ping.fm Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

Popular tool Ping.fm lets you distribute your content to a variety of microblogs and social networks – and it can now include your blog content to be shared automatically.

It’s a real-time feed powered by Superfeedr, which pumps out feed in XMPP or PUbsubhubbub formats. At the moment you can only list one RSS feed, but support for multiple feeds is coming in the near future for Ping’s 700,000 users.

If you’re considering the options for RSS autofeeding, Twitterfeed has been the main choice since the early days of Twitter, and also publishes to other networks including Facebook. In March they announced they have over 500,000 publishers sharing more than 1 million feeds.

The advantage of Ping.fm is that integrating the automation into your regular posting service means you’re perhaps more likely to keep it updated and compliment it with non-automated posts, whereas Twitterfeed can encourage a ‘fire and forget’ mentality, where your RSS feed becomes your entire Twitter stream. One solution to this is to create specific identities for your RSS streams. For instance, I tweet at @badgergravling, but also have @thewayoftheweb, @140char_com and @onlinedriver for each of my sites (Please feel free to follow all of them!)

I’m obviously a big fan of microblogging, having started this site with a few good people. And yet the current buzz around the concept does bring some of the problems to the forefront.

For starters, how fragmented will my identity become? I already have another blog, a profile on LinkedIn, a profile on a group magazine project, a profile on Facebook, one on Myspace, and one on Twitter. And that’s just the main sites I use on a day-to-day basis. And any reasonable input into microblogging requires a lot of time – enough to have an effect on the blogging output of a lot of people. Although surprisingly it can have a positive effect.

But until now, Twitter has been synonymous with microblogging. But with new challengers coming every day, is it really possible to comprehensively update:

Twitter
Plurk
Twoorl
Identi.ca
Globme
Jaiku
Pownce

And still have time to check other comments on Friendfeed and Socialthing?

You can always try cross publishing, and the number of posts brought to you by services like Ping.fm has radically increased. But is it really worth autofeeding yourself across so many networks? In the early stages the same early adopters will inhabit most of these sites, so you’re likely to be bombing most of the same people several times.

Or you can try and manually update each site, and unless you’re able to multitask to the nth degree, you can drive yourself insane within a week.

Luckily the answer to the problem will arrive eventually in the self-selection of the main sites. And that will simply come down to where the groups of friends exist. That’s why I think Twitter is secure for quite a while longer, as most people will have already reached a critical mass of connections that they won’t find on the other networks yet.

The issue it does raise, is a wider one, on how many different identities and personas are possible around an individual with even a wide sphere of influence and a lot of spare time – and where will that time come from?