Hey social butterflies, listen up.
If you’re like me, then you probably belong to a few different social networking websites. Wait...
Why? What’s the point? Aren’t all networks out there just one big copy of MySpace or Facebook? On the contrary, young butterfly! One of the most wonderful things about social networks is that many of them cater to specific niche groups.
With websites like Ning.com, you can even customize your own social network and reach out to people with special interests that match yours. So yes, there are benefits of belonging to different social networks where you can gather with different interest-based groups.
One huge drawback? Having to update your current user status on each and every social networking website to which you belong. Who’s got that kind of time?
Thankfully, in recognition of the fact that we social butterflies are always on-the-go, Ping.fm was born. This free website is an ideal one-stop-shop for updating your status on a plethora of social networks— a streamlined process that has come to be known as “micro-blogging.”
Back in September, Ping.fm emerged from its six month private beta testing and was introduced to the public micro-blogging community. Since then, it has allowed countless users to submit one status update through their website and share it across many popular social networks; this way, users don’t have to login to their Facebook account and their MySpace account and their Flickr account to share the same news.
In fact, they don’t have to go through updating processes for any of these popular social networking, bookmarking, or blogging websites:
Registering with Ping.fm seems fairly simply and only requires a handful of steps before access between the social networking sites is permitted. In so many words, and depending on each corresponding website, it goes a little something like this:
- Create a login with Ping.fm
- Check off which social networks to which you current belong
- Approve access permission for each of these social networks
- Update your status through Ping.fm...
...and simplify your notification process in seconds. Let clients, customers, or partners know you’ll be out of the office until Monday—no matter if they’re on LinkedIn, MySpace, or Twitter. Inform your Blogger and LiveJournal friends of a sale you’re having on your e-Commerce website from now through Christmas.
While Ping.fm might not ensure you micro-blogging effectiveness, it sure as heck increases efficiency. If you or your company relies on micro-blogging to keep your parties up-to-speed, I highly recommend you check out Ping.fm and save yourself the headache of updating the same thing to several social networks. After all, who has the time to copy and paste in this day-in-age?
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