Newman Zone

While looking for a way to update my Twitter and Facebook status at the same time, I came across Ping.fm. This service, still in beta, enables to you post to up to 30 social networks using email or IM.

Like most betas, many features are still under development, and documentation is sparse. However, after some trial and error, I found some good uses for it.

Text to Ping.fm

SMS isn’t supported natively, but there are  decent workarounds. I opted for the AIM TXT approach, which requires the following steps:

1. Get an AIM verification code from Ping.fm.
2. Send a text message to 246246 (AIMAIM):
   send pingfm [your_verification_code]
3. You should receive this text reply: “pingfm: (using AOL IM) Thanks! Your Ping.fm account is now set up to post messages through aim. Send me a message any time and I’ll post it for you.” At this point, you may want to add 246246 to your phone’s contacts.
4. To send a message to Ping.fm, simply text 246246 and specify pingfm as the recipient:
   send pingfm [your_status_message]

If  Step 2 doesn’t work, make sure you haven’t registered a different AIM screen name with Ping.fm. This is the mistake I made. When you send an instant message via AIM TXT, your AIM screen name is your mobile phone number (e.g., 12125551212), not your regular AIM screen name (even if you’ve associated a mobile number with your account). Unfortunately, you can only register one AIM screen name at a time with Ping.fm.

NOTE: If you’re using Facebook, you also have to install the Ping.fm application.

Phone to Ping.fm

There’s no native iPhone application for Ping.fm, but you can visit their iPhone or mobile site with your phone’s browser. This is a good option if you don’t have an unlimited text plan.

Instant Message to Ping.fm

If you’re using AIM TXT (see above), you cannot use AIM to update your Ping.fm status. But you can get verification codes for other, popular instant messaging services, such as Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger. I enabled Google Talk by following these steps:

1. Get a Jabber verification code.
2. Add pingbot@ping.fm to your Google Talk (or Gmail) buddy list.
3. Send an instant message to this new buddy containing only the Jabber verification code: 
   verify-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
4. You should receive this reply: “Thanks! Your Ping.fm account is now set up to post messages through Jabber. Send me a message any time and I’ll post it for you.”
5. You can send normal messages to this new buddy, or use a trigger to specify a specific service. For example, this message updates only your Twitter status:
   @tt Writing a blog post about Ping.fm

One nice feature of Ping.fm is the Adjust Grammar option, which you can enable in Settings. When you do this and post to Ping.fm using one of the methods above, your post is prefixed with “said:” on Facebook (as in, “Paul Newman said: Writing a blog post about Ping.fm”). Hopefully it will be possible to edit this prefix, or define different posting options using custom triggers, in the future.

Tags: Facebook, Twitter