Back in the summer of 2009, Shellen and fellow Googler Chris Wetherell, who were instrumental in creating Google Reader, founded Thing Labs, a social app shop. Their freshman product was Brizzly, a web-based social reader and third-party Twitter and Facebook client.
Brizzly was never in a position to compete with hard-hitting apps such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck, but this fact alone would have made Thing Labs a more palatable acquisition target for AOL. The latter company has struggled to integrate modern social aspects for years with little or no success; their strategy seems to have revolved around buying second-tier applications and frittering away those startups' talent and userbases.
We recall the 2008 acquisitions of FriendFeed competitor Socialthing (the product was "transitioned" into AOL Lifestream at the end of 2009) and Bebo (the faltering social network was sold three months ago).
Today's string of acquisition announcements -- acquisitions of an online video network, a popular tech blog and a Twitter/Facebook client -- are a repetition of a lesson AOL should have learned in the past: You can't buy Silicon Valley-grade social.
Rather, you can buy it, but integrating it into a network of old products and old problems is nearly impossible, and it will take more than a rebranding to fix and revitalize AOL.