graemehunter.co.uk

Okay, you’re a member of several Social Networks now. There is probably one you use a lot, likely the one you started with, but you haven’t done much with the others. What if you could post messages or updates to several of them at once? This is where ping.fm comes in. Presently supporting Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter, and soon to add support for Myspace and Bebo, this is a simple web-based app that will allow you to post to all of these networks at once. Nice and simple to set up, and it does what it promises fine. It’s still in a private beta at the moment, but let me know if you want to try it, I have a code that may (or indeed may not) still work for signup.

You can also bundle up what you’ve been doing at the other end too. Friendfeed will gather together feeds of your activities on several social networks, blogs, photo sites, Youtube, Last.fm and several other places, and offer them all up as a single feed (this is mine). You can also add all your friends, and follow their feeds too. I personally find that last element a little intrusive, as you can do that without asking. You can do so and choose to keep it private, but for now I won’t do either for anyone that hasn’t tracked me down and added me in Friendfeed.

There has been a little surge of these bundling services, taking the API or feeds of several different sites, and offering them up as a whole new site. Both definitely offer something to the user, and I’m using both daily now. I do wonder though if they strip away some of the individual features of different sites to fit what all of them have. I am sure there will be several more such ideas coming in the next few months though.