AOL has acquired Thing Labs, makers of Brizzly. Brizzly is a social media reader that lets users view and post updates to Twitter and Facebook., see photos and watch videos.

"AOL is a different company than it was even a year ago. We have to fundamentally change the way we think about the consumer experience and the team at Thing Labs has a vision and a track record of success that we think will help truly transform the messaging space," said Brad Garlinghouse, President of AOL’s Consumer Applications Group. "The team represents a great combination of vision, product knowledge and experience building innovative social products and we believe their contribution will further complement the exciting work that the Lifestream and AIM teams at AOL are doing."

The Thing Labs team will run AIM, AOL Lifestream and Brizzly. Brizzly will be integrated with the other applications over time.

"AIM, Lifestream and Brizzly are really complementary and we can’t wait to begin exploring how we can combine and enhance them to improve AIM and Lifestream," said Shellen. "AOL and Thing Labs share a creative vision that the Web should be fun, effortless, inspiring and trusted."

This would be the third major acquisition for AOL today. The company also acquired 5min media and TechCrunch. Where as the other two acquisitions are clearly content oriented, this one shows that content isn’t the only area of focus for AOL these days. 

The financial details of the acquisition remain a mystery.