The Power of Ping.fm and Friendfeed

For those of you who try to maintain an online presence for business or personal reasons, it can be a pain to keep those sites up to date. Many of them rely on the user (you) to keep it up to date with thoughts and status updates. The problem is between the hundreds of different options that are offered for social networking, keeping them all up to date can be a time consuming problem.

I have found both ping.fm and friendfeed.com to be very convenient ways of linking your social networking sites together for status updates, blogs, mini-blogs and even photos. You essentially update one site and it will broadcast the update across multiple social networking mediums.

Friendfeed, now acquired by facebook (here) and ping.fm both link together as well and work on pretty much any social networking site or chat client that there is to download.

Social Networking Websites

On the advice of my marketing company and many numerous friends who took the courageous leap long before I did, I begrudgingly joined the sites of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Myspace? Complete waste of my time. I see almost no value in the use of Myspace. Yes it is a very popular site, with many adolescence minds collaborating over what Britney's next move should be and what they are currently watching on TV while sitting on the couch. I truly wanted to like being a part of it, unfortunately I was immediately bored and decided to move on.

Then came facebook. Now that they have opened the doors to anyone; no longer limiting their membership to college or high school students, I was able to sign up. As opposed to Myspace, I found myself intrigued more with the interface, usage, and the applications that you can decide to use. I even managed to find quite a few people I have known in my life on there and was able to reconnect with those people whom I had no contact with for years. The look and feel of the site along with all the little fun to-do's it offers had me hooked. Every day I find myself checking my Facebook page wondering what my "network" is doing today. Such a simplistic idea for a site and yet so entertaining. Maybe spending 5-10 minutes a day on it proves that the site is not history changing, but for a site that is growing by tens of thousands a day - that is a lot of time people are spending on their site!

LinkedIn is my favorite from a professional standpoint. I was amazed how many of my peers were on this site, allowing for communication between everyone and the sharing of thoughts and ideas. It's also interesting seeing how everyone is "linked" together - turns out some of my friends and peers know people that I deal with but I never would have known it. LinkedIn allows for quite a Google indexed listing - turns out Google gives LinkedIn a pretty high priority in their search rankings.

Maybe being 30 I do not fully appreciate the power of some of these online social networks - I know there are hundreds more that I will never see or experience, but it amazes me that through the use of technology, we have found better and more efficient ways to be both closer together and further a part at the same time!