Update all your Social Status Messages with Ping.fm

If you’re a social network magician, you’ll know that a big part of these sites is “updating your status”. This can be something profound such as “discovered the meaning of life - 42!” to the more tedious “hey! Just discovered something big and green up my nose!“. But like it or hate it, status messages have become a big part of social networks and now Ping.fm has come along to make updating them a lot easier for you.

The service currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr (with MySpace and Bebo coming soon). By entering your current status into Ping.fm, the site will then send your status to your account on these social networks within 60 seconds (for me, it was done no later than 30 seconds). No longer do you have to visit each site individually and enter your status again and again. Now it can all be done remotely from one central location. A big time saver.

Upon creating your Ping.fm account, you are asked to log into your accounts on these social networks and authorize Ping.fm to update your status on your behalf. The fact that you have to provide your password may worry some people but Ping.fm has provided a privacy policy and you should read that and make your own mind up before proceeding. I was inclined to trust Ping.fm with my details. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Make me lose even more at Scrabulous?

Once you have authorized Ping.fm to act on your behalf, there are three ways they can update your status:

1. By web interface: you can enter your status message on the Ping.fm website and hit the enter button. Easy.



2. By email: Ping.fm provides you with an unique email address which you can use to email your status messages into the site:



3. By instant message: I really like this one. You can put Ping.fm bots on your IM contact list and then send your status to Ping.fm as instant messages. Supported networks at the moment is only AIM but a Google Talk bot is apparently imminent and support for more networks are apparently in the works:

But the feature I really like are the “triggers” - these are if you only want to post to certain networks and not to others :

@fb message - Post directly to Facebook
@jk message - Post directly to Jaiku
@pn message - Post directly to Pownce
@tr message - Post directly to Tumblr
@tt message - Post directly to Twitter

So if you wanted to only post to Facebook that you were watching a movie (for example) then your status message to Ping.FM would be @fb watching a movie. That way, it would only go to Facebook and not to say Twitter or Pownce.

To find out more, I had a short interview with the creator of Ping.FM, Sean :

Mark : What gave you the idea to start this service? What made you confident you could compete with an already existing service such as HelloTXT? What makes Ping.FM stand out from the crowd?

Sean : Ryan, (a colleague-of-mine-now-partner-in-crime) and I tossed the idea around the office for a day or so. We decided it would be pretty useful what with all of the micro-blogging sites starting to become so popular, so we put the gears in motion. Ryan moved to San Francisco shortly after and I started the concepts for the development.

At the time we started all of this, we had no idea that HelloTXT existed! It wasn’t until we were mentioned in a Mashable blog post that one of the guys came out and said hello.

I’m confident that our points of engagement; i.e. chat bots, widgets, apps and all of the other various platforms we’ve deployed on, not to mention the ones slated for launch will keep our services very useful.

Mark : How reliable would you say Ping.FM is? Has there been any down-time? Be honest now!

Sean : The only down-time we’ve come across was an issue with the AIM bot. It decided to go off line for several hours last weekend, but has yet to become a repeat offender. The site is very lightweight which makes it incredibly stable with high traffic. All message handling is done off the site, even if the site is down for any reason, all of the other
platforms will remain live as if nothing is wrong. It’s an intense system.

Mark : What definate new services are you planning to roll out in the near future? Do you have any other vague Ping.FM plans in your head that you’d like to share with the Make Use Of readers?

Sean : Current plans include an iPhone web app as well as a WAP based app for the phones that don’t support rich web content, an AIR platform, Windows platform, Mac dashboard widget and a few other platforms I’d like to keep a secret for the time being. We’re trying to push weekly roll-outs that include new features, but we’re developing them so fast we have to pace ourselves.

But, you can expect the GTalk bot and some other super secret platforms to go live within the next week for sure.

Mark : Are you planning to offer a cellphone text messaging capability like Twitter?

Sean : Yes, we are currently looking into premium SMS capabilities that will allow users to send messages to custom SMS short-codes.

Ping FM is in closed beta at the moment but Sean was nice enough to offer Make Use Of readers beta invites to try out the service. We have 100 invites to give away. Just go to Ping.FM and enter the beta code makeuseof. Then come back and let us know in the comments what you think of the service. If you’re a Mac user you might also want to check out Moodblast.

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

If you found this article useful then please help us spread the word by Stumbling It.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

If you like this article then subscribe to MakeUseOf feed and get latest articles delivered to your Feedreader. If you want to recieve latest articles in your email click here. It's FREE!