kosertech

I’m currently using 3 microblogging networks, mostly I use twitter but I’ve developed a soft spot for Plurk.  It’s got some very nice features in conversation following and also some drawbacks in that the tools to view the timeline make it a bit overwealming to keep up with everything going on.  Jaiku is a bit of a mix of Plurk and twitter.

Comparing and contrasting the social microblogging networks is a subject for a much longer post.  I started using Ping.fm a week or so ago, thanks to @dickieadams for the hookup on the invite code.

Ping.fm is a service that lets you update your status on a ton of different networks.  I currently count 16 different networks that it can simultaniously update from one post.  There is allot of value in this.  Especially if you have a different set of friends across your social networks.

I mostly have a similar set of friends across all three services so I’m still undecided on the value of posting to all three of the above at the same time, it almost seems like I’m spamming my contacts with the same information.  I tend to do a mix of updating all of them or posting to individual services then replying to things on the individual services.

After using the Ping.fm for a week I have the following suggestion for the service.  They have to implement assured delivery.  If I’m going to trust them with relaying my message to all of my services then I need some kind of alert if they were unable to post to a certain network.  I know that they are likely not using official API’s to post to several services plurk for one has no officially published API yet so I’m guessing they duplicate the normal page form for the updates.

I had several plurk updates go unposted tonight and it’s left me somewhat untrusting of ping.fm for the time being.  I’m going to end up having to check on things I wanted to post to make sure they made it through and thats not really saving me any time by using ping.fm.

I think ping.fm has a ton of potential and I’m going to continue using it but I think they could really enhance their product by putting in some quality of service type status update verifications that would simply send me an email stating “Your status update ‘update text i wrote’ to twitter was unable to be posted please try again later”

if you want to give ping.fm a try head on over and sign up the current invite code is “letmeping”