Today I noticed that my cat, Helvetica, was taking too much time checking all the various conversational sites that he is a part of. I began to wonder if there might be a quicker way for him to go about doing this.

Welcome to the world of: What are you doing right now?!?

Let me introduce you to the increasingly voyeuristic platforms of Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook, which are called (and considered) presence networks. These sites outfit us with a way to stay connected. We express (in 140 characters of less) exactly what we are up to at that very moment, live and uncensored, no matter how mundane or excitable it may be.

As a PR practitioner, staying up-to-date with the latest forms of communication is crucial. Arguably, knowing how to “jump into” the digital conversation is the future of PR. What Socialthing! does is allow users access to the site from any computer (there is no applications to download which is convenient) and like a RSS reader, it manages all your lifestreaming accounts. Although Socialthing! may not offer a lot in the way of 2.0 conversation, as an input device, it’s the cat’s meow. I am taking the stance that as more PR professionals use social media to convey messages, they will need a good feed reader to keep track of all the conversations.

In a recent video blog posting by Aaron Brazell, he interviews Brian Solis, of FutureWorks (a decorated PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley). They discuss various interesting PR topics but most important to this post is that they talk about how new media is creating extra work for the PR practitioner. This just proves my point that with the creation of Socialthing! the PR practitioner can easily and efficiently follow a blogger’s Twitter/Facebook/Pownce feed all in one go. We all know corporate communicators pay good money to those who make their lives easier.

An article in Business Wire called, Socialthing! Opens Private Beta for Its Digital Life Manager, the author goes further to elaborate on the overall benefits of Socialthing!

The service uses proprietary technology to integrate “friend lists” and other content on these sites automatically and with limited subsequent user intervention, effectively creating a single manager for anyone’s digital life.

What does all this mean? Well, Socialthing! “makes interacting with web-based content easier and more productive.”

Another person who agrees with me on how Socialthing! is the cat’s meow is Muhammad Saleem, a blogger who writes about social media and new media trends for entrepreneurs.

Socialthing! is quite simply an aggregator and not a network (at least not yet) and the reason why I love it is because when I interact with an element from socialthing!, the interaction appears on the external site (from which the lifestream was aggregated) and not on socialthing! itself. For example, when I reply to someone’s twitter message, the reply appears on twitter.

This tool helps PR professionals maintain and follow important players and their conversations more closely.

While Socialthing! is still being exclusively beta tested, a few kinks are in the process of working themselves out, but like any software that is being tested, these complaints tend to be user based. In the latest blog posting by creator and CEO, Matt Galligan, he comments on the future of Socialthing!;

We have a very extensive roadmap with a ton of great features that all play into the premise that we’re a “digital life manager”. Right now we’re working on the most mission critical pieces of that. There’s some things that we’re releasing soon that will be pretty significant.

Looks like we will all have to wait and see. However, my cat Helvetica is pretty content with what Socialthing! has to offer now.

My question is, how did my cat get an invitation and not me?!?