ping.fm
Bet that title is a little bit cryptic for anyone not in the know, but I have mentioned it sometime ago here in the blog. For those that were not around or who are just now getting to this wonderful piece of the net that I call my blog, here is a quick little refresher:
In the early days (like mid 2008) there was this thing called twitter that let you do tweets. Basically it was like a place on the web that was just designed to do like your basic status kind of deal however often you wanted to do it and that is really all it offered. Oh, and it also had the capability of sending and receiving those tweets via SMS, basically the way text messages work on your cell phone. By the way, if you are wondering, I do have twitter that I only occasionally (like maybe 3-4 times a day) tweet to – cornishr is the user ID if I recall correctly – if anyone is that interested.
More recently along comes several options like ping.fm that offer the ability to send a message to one location and like an email list-server, when configured correctly it pushes those status messages out to several social networks. Add to that it has the ability to shorten a URL like http://www.mephistos.com/2009/01/13/pingfm to something like http://ping.fm/2340b2 to allow it work nicely with the 140 character limit of true SMS and it becomes a great tool. It does not stop there though. For those that platforms that do not have the built-in or easily accessible API’s, you can do custom URL’s and self define how things work. Add even more function, with the extensions that allow inclusion of photos and even full blog entries. And all of this can accessed through a simple cell phone SMS or even a message from your favorite instant messenger program such as Yahoo Instant Messenger.
Now if you are into trying to grow your space and more importantly traffic on your own little corner of the web your brain should be spinning so fast now that the cobwebs are literally flying off. But just in case they are not think about this. You have a blog. You make a post. You have a few automatic pickups to big social networks, like say Facebook. But for those few others it would be nice to push it out without a manual process. You post the message via ping.fm and the note is out there, along with a URL. It works for anyone that is a friend or subscribed to you anywhere on the net.
Now go one more step. If your blog is on my favorite blogging platform – a self hosting WordPress install then with a plugin named pingpressfm you can automatically push out your notice and link of your published postings to all your friends and such on all your different social networks (and any custom sites) automatically without doing anything. Further, if you install (and finally figure out exactly what you need to do – as this took me a bit) you can install the ping.fm plugin and just like I have up in the top left now, you can have short status updates show up on your blog page just like your social network pages and here you can keep a history of them as well, showing how ever many you want. Keep in mind, once you get installed, don’t do like I did and go mucking around with the database tables on a poor connection – you may get timed out just at the wrong moment and have to re-install it all to get it to pick things back up.
Anyway, one more tool in your backpack for eventually creating your own web-based empire to take over the world-wide web with and eventually be more famous than the infamous Martha Stewart.
Sounds good, might be a little technical for me, but I'll have to look into it. Thanks!
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