Ping.fm

» see ping.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ping.fm showed up in my browser bookmarks around 2008-2009 when i was posting the same lines to twitter, facebook, and one or two other places (friendfeed, jaiku for a while). writing the same status three times felt idiotic. ping.fm was the fix, a single input box that fanned out to whichever networks you had connected.

i did not stay on it long. by 2010 i had mostly consolidated on twitter for public thoughts and msn for private ones, so the fan-out pitch stopped mattering for me. sean mccullough, adam duffy, and ryan merket launched it in march 2008 and hit fifty thousand users in three days. no marketing, just a clean utility that solved a friction everyone felt.

after the first year, seesmic acquired ping.fm on 4 january 2010. loic le meur was building seesmic into a twitter-adjacent client suite and ping.fm was the multi-post plumbing that made the whole vision credible. by early 2012 seesmic announced ping.fm would close in june. the actual shutdown slipped a few days into july. hootsuite bought seesmic in september 2012 and folded the whole thing further in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

at its plain level ping.fm was a switchboard. you connected an account to twitter, facebook, myspace, friendfeed, jaiku, pownce, tumblr, wordpress, blogger, plurk. by 2010 the supported-network count sat around fifty. you posted from a web textarea, an email address, an sms, or an im bot on aim/gtalk/yahoo/msn. the status went out to whichever networks you had ticked.

the feature that mattered more than the fan-out was the routing rules. you could set a shorter status to go only to twitter, a longer one to only blogs, a photo attachment to only flickr. that was the actual novelty. it made cross-posting less lazy and more editorial.

~ the seesmic swallow ~

i was not close to the acquisition conversation, still, seesmic paid an undisclosed amount in january 2010 and kept the ping.fm brand alive for another eighteen months. the plan was to route seesmic desktop clients through ping.fm plumbing. in practice the two products stayed mostly separate through 2011, with the ping.fm site running on its own domain.

the rebrand to seesmic ping came in early 2012, a step toward folding the two together. seesmic ping was a paid product from launch, ping.fm had been free. that was the wedge that pulled the free users off the original service.

~ the day it died ~

on 5 july 2012 the ping.fm domain stopped accepting new posts and started redirecting to seesmic. two months later hootsuite acquired the whole seesmic stack for an undisclosed amount and eventually folded seesmic ping too. by 2013 hootsuite had absorbed the multi-post idea into its own dashboard, and ping.fm as a distinct name was a footnote you had to search hard to find.

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