Ping.Fm – Social Broadcaster, Post to many services at once
As well as this post being some ramblings about why I really love Ping.fm, here are some of my chicklets from my ever growing collection of badges, icons and chicklets. Since the chaps at Profilactic started using the one I did for them Powered by Profilactic badge that was previously knocked up, I have neen enthused to do further Web applications.
So feel free to use and abuse this logo, small request at bottom of this post.
Ping.fm. It’s a invite only Beta, barely a surprise there. They are however very free with the giving out of the invite code, so it should be no problem getting on board.
Don’t expect a two way communication here with Ping, it is strictly one way and that way is out and not in. It does one thing only and it does it painlessly and effortlessly. At the time of this post, it currently supports: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, Hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Wordpress.
What makes Ping so useful is that it is so simple to set-up, configure and use. There is only one screen and you do everything from this one screen. So no clicking around here. It’s a true one-stop shop for posting or broadcasting to your Social Network services, MicroBlogs and Blogs. One window to enter your message and that’s it. Enter your message and voila, all the services you have set-up are then updated, and pretty quickly too. Usually within minutes.
Setting up each service is a painless couple of clicks. You can easily activate or deactivate as you wish. You can Ping one service, two, three, all or none! You can even create Triggers that allow you to create a sequence of service pings by just typing the the initial of each service as below:
Ping.fm actively launches new services regularly, so this list grows weekly.
If you have multiple services and want them all updated with your same messages then Ping is exactly what you need. It is a efficient way of keeping all your services updated with fresh content. It may be cheating to some people but I disagree. I have personally joined up to as many services as I can, that includes all the services Ping caters for and many more that they don’t. I never intented to spend time on sites like Bebo, Hi5, MySpace, all I wanted was to create a presence for ImJustCreative, set-up a basic profile and photo. Now having Ping makes maintaining these sites a snip. It’s one thing to join up all these services and never post to them, now I can. And I actually get results from these mini post updates, which for me shows its worth doing.
If you have Facebook set up to take updates from Twitter, Jaiku etc, then you need to seriously look at this in terms of removing duplicate feeds. My FaceBook feeds were getting out of control, so some aggressive pruning is required. YOu can even install the Ping application into your FaceBook profile and then send messages via Ping from FaceBook. If you really want to. I don’t.
Life Stream sites are even more of a problem, with the temptation to set up ALL your services, especially with Profilactic, your own Mash-Ups would just be full of multiple duplicate posts. Which serves no useful purpose to you whatsoever and to anyone reading from outside.
Now I have a very streamlined set-up, no duplicate content, feeds or updates to any of my micro blogs, life stream aggregators and social networks.
I do consider myself somewhat of an expert now in this configuring of all these sites, so any advice you need please do ask.
Ping.fm Adobe Air App
What I am waiting for very impatiently is for someone to create an Adobe Air Application for Ping.fm. Having the ability to write posts from a floating Air application is simply the next step of Ping evolution. Even a Mac OS Dashboard Widget would be useful than having to keep a constant browser window open. I post a lot of updates throughout the day and having to keep finding my Ping window is just tiresome. Poor me. Now a floating Air app would make me very happy.
Ofcourse you are free to use these however you wish. It would be appreciated though if you could find somehow to link to this page or at least my site. Nothing obtrusive, just maybe a link in your Blogroll or something. That would be nice.
Article Posted On: April 15, 2008 at 8.48 pm
Written By
In Categories: Blogging, Social Media
A FEW OPTIONAL EXTRAS
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