PingFM

OK so when a team of developers claims to be powered by " folk music and sugar-free Red Bull" it generally does not engender confidence, but Adam & Sean over at pingfm (http://ping.fm/) have both a great sense of humour and (sorry guys) a better product.

The basic idea is that you can enter your status and ping it out to multiple sites. This is so simple you can type "off to lunch" and automatically update over 30 social networking sites including the three top sites, twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Now that’s impressive, but when you figure out you can send that ping from over ten different methods provided by the developers its fantastic. This includes the main IM clients, email, SMS iPhone and WAP.

However, I am not the only one that loves the product, other developers do as well. This means that people such as twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/) will take this blog entry, shrink it create a link to the original article and send it to my ping account (more 3rd party apps listed on the site and in Wikipedia) . Ping will then take this and ping it out to all of my many social sites so my 2 followers [ :-( ] can actually choose on which of the social sites they are linked to they want to read this from. Also my favourite WM6 client ceTwit (http://www.kosertech.com/blog/?page_id=5) will send direct to ping just I case I forgot to send the message be fore I left the office or after I am at the Bar (must remember not to do that again). This all meets my cardinal rule of data being "entered once correctly at the source". Bonus points for anyone that knows where I stole that one from, but you will first have to admit you follow my ramblings.

OK so it is free and it is beta so it has a few issues. However, the ping team have the fervour of people truly passionate about what they do and the system has only occasionally been down materially (i.e. more than 2 mins) and then they kept people updated on twitter (http://twitter.com/pingfm). As I work in pretty much every time zone I tend to notice other people that do the same and these guys really burn the midnight oil when there is any sort of issue.

You can find some more information over at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping.fm) or go over there and sign up for an account and start pinging (http://ping.fm/)!

Oh as well as text they also support pictures and have me convinced they will support video soon.

I now just have to hope they are making enough money to be happy and not have to sell the tech to someone that is not as passionate as they are!

Tell me what day it is and I will tell you where I am

Official mine of usless information