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, Ping.fm supports a variety of posting options.
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: Read More about How to Access Facebook When You Can’t Log in
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.
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n 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?
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 (s goog) 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. Read More about Google Reader Adds Easy Sharing, Other Features
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.
Read More about Facebook Pages Now Supported By Status Update Services Ping.fm, HelloTxt
Reading Eric Berlin’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 or even standards and, in many cases, still don’t. So I thought I’d share some slides from my old presentation to demonstrate the evolution of our social media vernacular in such a short time span.
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.
Read More about Say Hello To HelloTxt As Status Update Service Space Heats Up
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.
Read More about Use Ping.fm to Reach All Your Online Profiles at Once
Just yesterday, I was on camera saying how much I’m looking forward to the Palm (s 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 (s GOOG) Android device: How long before developers embrace it and deliver a vast array of software?
Read More about Palm Pre Losing Mojo Each Day the SDK is Held Close
Ping.fm, a social media application that lets users cross-post messages to multiple sites has received an undisclosed amount of angel fundin…
