Syncing your Micro World

Yes, yes.. I admit it. I have fallen victim to the micro-blog craze. I’ve had an account with Pownce for a long time, but never really used it (the only reason I got it was to support dear ol’ Kevin Rose). I’ve also had a FaceBook account since.. well.. since way back when it was only available to college students.

Anywho… recently I began actually updating my FaceBook status on a semi-regular basis. I installed the FaceBook toolbar for Firefox (which I HIGHLY recommend) which gives me a little pop-up showing my friends’ status updates… so I started updating mine more often.

A few days ago I noticed my friend Roy had become a fan of something called BrightKite. Naturally I clicked on the link and read up about it. I liked the idea of “checking in” and seeing who was in the area… and possibly helping to create an interactive profile of locations, so I found someone with invites to spare (the service is in Beta at the moment) and got myself an account. This was closely followed by activating a Twitter account.

I suddenly found myself in a position where I had multiple micro-blogging sites (each of which has a target audience), and no desire to send 100 messages to different sites whenever I wanted to say I was doing something. Normal people at this point would simply have picked one or two and left it at that. I, however, was determined to find a way to sync everything together so I only had to send one message, two max, and have everything be updated automatically for me. I tried a few different methods, but they were all either clunky, or screwed something up (like HelloTxt updating Pownce twice for every message.. wtf?).

The answer turned out to be yet another beta service: Ping.fm

As of this posting, Ping.fm can update the following services for you:

• Bebo
• Blogger
• Facebook
• hi5
• Jaiku
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• MySpace
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Twitter

If you use it with an actual blog (like Blogger or Live Journal) you can post whole bloggs.. title and all. This service is fast, reliable, and super easy to use. There is an AIM bot so you can even update by sending an instant message (I did that for the first time this morning ). There is a fantastic moble aspect that is fast loading so you can send out quick messages from your phone’s browser. You also have a unique email address you can send messages to if you want. Fantastic. I love it.

At this time, Ping.fm does not sync with BrightKite. That’s okay for me, though. BrightKite is a little different. I check into locations there, not just update status messages. BrightKite can update your Twitter location though. Which is cool.

Anyway… the long of the short of it is, with Ping.fm I have all my micro-blogging synced finally. And I am really liking the BrightKite concept of location-based social networking (they’re not the first ones to do it, but it’s the one that has sucked me in ).

If you would like to try out BrightKite let me know. I have a few invites.

If you would like to try out Ping.fm let me know. You can sign up and get a beta account, but you need the current betacode… which changes frequently. Let me know if you would like to sign up and I can get you the most recent betacode.