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Seesmic Acquires Ping.fm to Post to More Social Services

Liz Gannes — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:00:44 +0000

Seesmic, in its efforts to be the Grand Central Station for social network updates, has “acq-hired” Ping.fm. Where Seesmic has mostly focused on the ability to consume social web information on various platforms — Android, BlackBerry, web, Windows Silverlight and Adobe Air — Ping.fm supports a variety of posting options — by email, SMS and chat, and to 50 social networks. (Seesmic previously only supported Twitter and Facebook.)

Tulsa, Okla.-based Ping.fm only had two employees, co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, who will keep on working on the product for Seesmic. The company had raised angel funding last year from Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito.

Seesmic has “hundreds of thousands” of daily users and more than 3.5 million app downloads to date, said CEO Loic Le Meur. With Ping.fm’s 500,000 registered users and thousands of sign-ups per day, Seesmic expects to have more than 1 million users later this year, Le Meur said. Asked how the acquisition will help Seesmic monetize, Le Meur responded, “Given our funding, we are in no rush to monetize and focus on the market share, but we will start monetizing in 2010 with both nonintrusive advertising and premium services, on the successful Evernote model.”

Seesmic’s previous acquisition, of Twitter client Twhirl, had helped the company gain a user base and add major functionality — before that it had been a video Twitter. The company has raised $12 million from investors including Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

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How to Access Facebook When You Can't Log in

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:00:33 +0000

While trying to log into Facebook a few days ago, I got the message, “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” I checked with friends, and they were able to access their accounts, so the problem seemed to be limited.

It turns out that there have been widespread complaints about this issue, which Facebook has acknowledged on its Help page:

“Site Maintenance” error
Some users have experienced difficulty logging in to and using the site for several days, receiving “Site Maintenance” error messages after logging in. We are aware of this technical issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologize for the delay.

I was lucky, and was able to get back into the Facebook site fairly quickly. While I was locked out, I couldn’t post to my personal Facebook page, but fortunately I could use some Facebook functions because I’d set up RSS feeds and access via third-party programs in advance.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to be discouraging RSS feeds for Notifications (messages like “Jane Doe has commented on your link”), so you may not be able to follow the RSS instructions given in the Facebook Help. Status Updates (like “Jane Doe is ready for a long weekend”) can be accessed via a Facebook application that creates an RSS feed for your status updates.

If you administer any Facebook Groups and Pages, these should be unaffected by log-in failures. So make sure that you give a friend administrative rights to your group or page. If their accounts are not affected, they can post material for you. You should also be able to post to Facebook Pages (but not Groups) via third-party programs such as Ping.fm and Seesmic Desktop, if you set up these programs with posting rights ahead of time.

It’s frustrating when you can’t log into the Facebook site, but you may be able to do more than you expect. Let’s hope that while Facebook is having log-in issues, it allows easier access to our data through RSS and third-party programs.

How do you manage when you can’t log into Facebook?

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New Facebook Features: @Mentions, Browse Friends by City

Charles Hamilton — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:00:46 +0000

Facebook is rolling out “@ mentions” similar to those found in Twitter. According to the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

This feature isn’t working for me yet, so I haven’t been able to try it. It’s unclear how this will affect services like Ping.fm that allow simultaneous posting to Twitter and Facebook, especially if one has different usernames on the two sites.

In addition, Facebook has added a feature allowing users to browse and filter friends by city. To access this feature, go to Friends, then click on Browse. You’ll be given an option to browse by City; a dropdown menu will appear showing the cities in which you have friends. Who knew that I had a friend in Pawtucket, RI?

Will you find these features useful?

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Google Reader Adds Easy Sharing, Other Features

Charles Hamilton — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:00:02 +0000

I read a lot of online publications, and I like to share interesting articles with clients and friends on Twitter. If you use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, as I do, it’s now easier to post links to news articles you’ve found in Google Reader to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

In Google Reader’s Settings, you’ll now find an option called “Send To.” On that screen, you can specify which services you want to be able to post to. Once you’ve set it up, at the bottom of each article in the main Google Reader screen, you’ll see a “Send To” menu.

The system does work, but it’s decidedly low-tech. As an example, if you click “Send to Twitter,” Google Reader brings you to your Twitter account via a popup window, meaning that you’ll need to turn off popup blocking for google.com in your browser — something many people will prefer not to do.

By comparison, most of the other services that allow you to post to Twitter, like FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Streamy, Amplify and Posterous, use the Twitter oAuth system, which is much slicker — although oAuth has been down a lot recently due to the attacks against Twitter. I will probably continue to use FriendFeed as my link between Google Reader and Twitter, but the new Reader feature is a nice alternative option.

In addition to the “Send To” feature, Google Reader has added a dropdown menu to the “Mark All as Read” button that allows you to mark as read only those articles older than a day, a week, or two weeks. You can also easily subscribe to the feeds of people you follow, and there are added enhancements to the comment screen, and to the start pages of the mobile versions of the Reader.

How do you post links to Twitter and other social sites?

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Facebook Pages Now Supported By Status Update Services Ping.fm, HelloTxt

Eric Berlin — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:00:49 +0000

We recently covered status update services Ping.fm and HelloTxt, competitors in the growing market for tools and services that help social media fans and online marketers manage communication using multiple social media profiles. Now Facebook has made Facebook Pages, the publicly available profiles for businesses, accessible for updating via both Ping.fm and HelloTxt.

HelloTxt, for example, allows you to post text messages, images and videos directly to Facebook Page walls. And while both Ping.fm and HelloTxt support the common hashtag (#) convention used on many microblogging and social media sites these days, HelloTxt has gone further in allowing hashtags to be used as a way to quickly and easily manage outbound status updates. By using the Settings page, HelloTxt members can set hashtags to apply to individual or groups of social media sites, so that when a hashtag is invoked (such as “#dealoftheday,” for example) only those profiles tied to that hashtag will receive the status update. As ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez points out, this should appeal to online marketers and social media workers who are managing multiple Facebook Pages at once.

Facebook’s aggressive promotion of new products such as Facebook Pages and Facebook Connect serves several purposes. Pages allows Facebook to become a more “open” platform for companies to market their products to its enormous online community, while Facebook Connect is vying to become a universal login that people can use to access social media web sites across the Internet.

While Facebook was already included in the services that Ping.fm and HelloTxt supported, when you updated your Facebook status, only friends of that profile could see it. Because Facebook Pages are not subject to the same privacy rules as regular Facebook profiles they can reach a wider audience and so are better-suited for being part of the social media strategy that online marketers are increasingly using to reach a large, yet targeted, online marketplace quickly and efficiently.

Are Facebook Pages part of your social media marketing strategy?

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How We Talk About Social Media

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:00:18 +0000

Reading Eric’s recent post about HelloTxt, I went back to some old files and opened up a presentation I gave last summer at BizJam Seattle and was treated to some entertaining content. At least, it was funny to me. I just had to laugh at the way I struggled to come up with compact, clear ways of categorizing and naming social media tools.

How easy it is to forget that everything we use and talk about every day now — just one year later — didn’t have a set of agreed-upon terms. I thought I’d share some slides from my old presentation to show how difficult it is to come up with ways to describe the tools that we use.

I discussed what I called Social Media Aggregation Broadcasting Tools or SABTs. I defined SABTs as third-party applications that allow you to both aggregate and broadcast messages — or status updates — to your other networks.

I divided those into four categories:

Active
Passive
Niche
Integrated

So here is how I grouped applications that were available last summer:

Active SABTs were the applications that let you actively broadcast your updates to multiple networks. At the time, Ping.fm was still in private beta by invitation only.

Passive SABTs were the applications that you could add to your blog to allow others to update update their own social networks. All you had to do was make those links available to your readers and provide content worth sharing. Then you could sit back while others shared your content with their friends, fans and followers.

Niche SABTs were the applications that began popping up that were exclusive to a single network. The most common were the clients being developed for Twitter to make it easier to tweet without having to constantly visit the web site to access your account.

Integrated SABTs were the built-in broadcasting features that some of the social networks were adding on as integrated features.

Despite the chuckle that I got when I read my earnest attempt at crafting these terms, I actually feel that my theories still hold up. My attempt to “name” these tools was definitely more than a little awkward, but the intention was clear.

We are all facing a huge influx of apps and tools that we are struggling to understand, to learn how to use, and to integrate into our everyday work.

Seeing how far we’ve come in less than a year’s time is not just amusing — it is downright fascinating.

What are some of the ways you explained social media “back in the day” that gives you a little chuckle today?

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Say Hello To HelloTxt As Status Update Service Space Heats Up

Eric Berlin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:00:50 +0000

Just as services designed to help social media enthusiasts manage multiple online profiles are becoming increasingly popular, services designed to manage posting status updates and communication to multiple online profiles are becoming plentiful as well. Recently, I covered Ping.fm, which has now been joined by Italy-based HelloTxt, a similar product that allows users to update a host of social networking, social media and blogging platforms, all at once.

Like Ping.fm, HelloTxt allows you to update a large number of online profiles and publishing platforms through a single entry field. (They claim to support 45 “social networks” as compared to 30 for Ping.fm.) Upon registering for HelloTxt, you’re given the option to add your active profiles from a wide array of services, such as Twitter, Bebo and Remember The Milk.

The number of characters in the status entry field count “up” so that you can make sure to cut status messages off at the all-important 140 mark, to keep with Twitter’s character limit. A nifty feature included in the status entry area is the ability to “post in the future,” setting the date for a status update ahead of time.

Beyond text status messages, images can be posted using your Flickr account, video via YouTube, music and audio files via Blip.fm, and streaming video via Seesmic.

HelloTxt is accessible through the web, and can also be updated via email, SMS, and Google Talk. An API is also offered that allows developers to install the service on other web sites or apps, a popular trend for status update and microblogging products.

It would seem that HelloTxt is an emerging player in the status update space. The company claims that it has attained 30,000 users “with no marketing to date,” with 35 percent of daily status updates coming from third-party sites, through its API.

Like any evolving web product, it has some rough edges that should be worked out over time. For example, after adding a product (such as Bebo) to your HelloTxt account, you can add that same account again later; an indication that you’ve already added it would be helpful.

It must also be noted that HelloTxt’s tagline, “we are status,” is quite catchy!

What’s your take on the growing popularity of status update services such as Ping.fm and HelloTxt?

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Use Ping.fm to Reach All Your Online Profiles at Once

Eric Berlin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:00:01 +0000

Often it’s the (seemingly) simple applications that turn out to be the most powerful, and the most popular. Twitter is a great example of this.

Ping.fm, a service that allows you to easily update a host of social networking and social media profiles all at once, seeks to resolve the headache of needing to log into multiple accounts to send the same message to different groups of friends and contacts all over the Internet.

While for some Ping.fm may just be a nice little time-saving utility, for social media and online marketing professionals, this service may well be a killer app.

Ping.fm currently supports more than 30 services, including microblogging platforms such as Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku, social networking web sites such as Facebook and Multiply, instant messaging applications such as GTalk Status and AIM Status, and most of the popular blogging platforms. Once you’ve set up a Ping.fm account and added your credentials for the services you use for social networking and social media purposes, you’re ready to return to your Ping.fm dashboard to send messages out to all of your profiles at once.

Adding your various social networks can be a little clunky simply because you need to have all of your various usernames, passwords and network keys at your disposal, but Ping.fm does a pretty good job of making the process as seamless as possible.

On the dashboard page, you can send out messages, or “pings,” to your selected services. The default setting sends your message to all of your services, but you can also filter profiles by “micro-blogs” or “statuses.” This is a nice feature, giving you the ability to parse your messages into groups, but I must admit that I don’t entirely understand which services fall into which categories (is FriendFeed a “micro-blog” or a “status”, for instance?). A character counter also lets you know the size of your ping, which is vitally important for squeezing your message in under Twitter’s 140-characters-per-tweet limit, for example. And a “Record Video” link allows you to stream a video recording directly through Ping.fm.

A nice feature is the ability to send out messages through Ping.fm “from” multiple locations. A huge array of “Services/Tools” on the dashboard allow you to set up your Ping.fm account so that you can ping via email, SMS, instant message, Facebook app, iPhone app, desktop app, and so on. This serves up enormous flexibility in allowing you to send a single message from anywhere and distribute your message to a large number of profile destinations quickly and easily.

The potential downsides to using Ping.fm are overlap and not engaging with individual social media and social networking communities as they are intended. Overlap comes in the form of having many of the same friends, colleagues and contacts on multiple services; sending them the same message “over and over again” on multiple profiles might only serve to annoy. Additionally, social media and social networking sites are meant to be two-way communications platforms, not one-way broadcasting mechanisms. If people perceive you as being someone who is broadcasting marketing messages and not interested in engaging with individual communities or, even worse, spamming communities with marketing messages and links, that can seriously damage your ability to effectively utilize social media for whatever purpose –- developing relationships, promoting a product or service, burnishing your professional reputation, and so on -– you had in the first place.

Overall, Ping.fm looks to be a simple (in a good way), effective, and easy-to-use service to communicate to multiple online communities quickly.

What do you think of Ping.fm?

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Palm Pre Losing Mojo Each Day the SDK is Held Close

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:22:06 +0000

Just yesterday, I was on camera saying how much I’m looking forward to the Palm Pre. With my first-gen iPhone contract up in July, I’m sure to get a new phone this summer. There’s still some open questions around the Pre, such as battery life and the cost to use the phone as a tethered modem for a notebook or netbook. The biggest question I have right now is the same one I had for Google’s Android device: How long before developers embrace it and deliver a vast array of software?

This morning, I read a Wired article about Palm’s recent efforts to energize developers. Teleconferences and “preDevCamps” are happening to support the effort, which is great. Then I saw something that I probably should have known already, but I obviously had missed it:

“Palm has not said when it will makes its Pre SDK widely available to developers, but a select few already have had access to it.”

TeleNav is one of those select few, so I’d expect their navigation software to be available at, or soon after, Pre’s launch. And Palm introduced software partners like Facebook and Fandango at their CES unveiling. But there’s already a good mobile web interface for what those partners already offer, so while I’m sure these apps will appeal to many, they’re not really showing off “newness.”

My worry here is that Palm will face the same challenge that Google has faced with Android: a six-month wait (or more) after launch for a solid library of compelling applications. If it’s going to be so easy to develop WebOS apps with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, what’s the holdup on the Mojo SDK? Short of WebOS simply not being ready for developers to poke and prod, I can’t think of another reason. The longer developers wait for the SDK release, the wider the potential time gap between a hardware launch and a large library of software.

I haven’t changed my leaning towards the Pre, however I’ll be watching to see how long it takes before developers can start creating software for it. I don’t spend hundreds of dollars on mobile phone software, but it would be nice to have the option and not wait six months for a library of choice. The good news in all of this? From what I’ve read so far, developers do seem jazzed by the Palm presentations. I’d be more concerned if they weren’t.

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Social Web's Big Question: Federate or Aggregate?

Om Malik — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:08:37 +0000

Inventor and tech philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that, he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.

United Federation of the Social Web

Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”

Facebook Connect, which was announced in May and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.

HyperAggregate

On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.

Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log in and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Vachani describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.

It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.

A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Vachani insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Vachani called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.

Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people, not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.

Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators….It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”

The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.

A Privacy Problem?

First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:

You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.

Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power – Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.

All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.

Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third-party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.

Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur

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