AOL’s promotion of online identities manager Socialthing continues this week by tying it in across corporate sibling Warner Bros. Television Group. The deal also suggests a new closeness with its fellow Time Warner subsidiary, even as the company moves to spin off AOL (NYSE: TWX). In past years, WBTVG and AOL would often downplay any relationship to each other. But as AOL tries to build up its social net tools, alongside its own programming, the Time Warner unit needs all the friends it can get. In this case, WBTVG will use Sociathing to insert news of its programming on AOL’s global messaging network of 57 million monthly AIM and ICQ users. Socialthing is still working on getting its hooks into Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) or OpenID, which will exponentially increase its ability to make it easy for users to spread the word about a publisher’s online content. (For an example of how Socialthing’s tool looks on WBTVG’s sites, see the example after the jump).

SEE ALSO: AOL Starts Rolling Out Socialthing Tool

Meanwhile, WBTVG has been working with a number of social nets to promote the online content on its various sites—CWTV.com, TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DCHeroZone.com, Essence.com and Momlogic.com—since last year, when it began creating broadband content independent of its broadcast productions. WBTVG struck a deal with MySpace last fall to market one of its original web video series, Sorority Forever on the reincarnated video portal TheWB.com. Release