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Ping.fm is a mass status update utility like Social.me. It supports a huge number of services, more than Social.me, and also many more features. Ping.fm had been in private beta since some time, and recently has been opened up to the public. From first impressions, it looks like a very polished service, and can easily make one chose it over Social.me.
Along with status updates, Ping.fm provides you with various ways of updating them. You can update all of your statuses simultaneously, but you can also update them from you IM and other services:
The list of services that it supports is vast too. The image below shows the services they support, along with Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter which are missing below because I had already added them during this review.
They also have a developer API available. Interestingly, the services can be divided into two parts, Statuses and Micro-blog. And you can select to update either or all of them at a time.
The good thing about Ping.fm is the wide range of methods through which you can update your statuses. But, with the huge amount of Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Pownce and various other microblogging platform desktop applications, it seems hard for me to personally convert as a user. Also, it seems weird why I would want to use a service like Ping.Fm to update my status on a website such as Twitter and Pownce and others at once, which would in turn show in my FriendFeed as it aggregates all of them. This could potentially ‘spam’ those services or bring more noise to FriendFeed, as if it needs any more.
I’m not denying the usability of Ping.fm, but with a service like FriendFeed, it all comes down to choices. Being a FriendFeed user, I wouldn’t want to update all my statuses to the same one at once, as it would make my Feed look rather odd. But other then that, Ping.fm is a very well made website, and it’s easy to use and navigate. Plus, the wide range of options can make it adopt to anyone’s usage habits, as in you can update everything from you Windows Live Messenger if you use it a lot. Give a try, you’ll get to like it.
I personally like the Idea of updating all my statuses at once, but I’ll wait for it to mature a bit first.
you can give http://www.Hellotxt.com a try, it’s probably the oldest such service and used by many.