Ping, at last!

Ping is clearly one of the coolest apps I’ve stumbled across in a long time!

As I’ve gotten deeper into my exploration of Web 2.0 apps, each one seems to have a place for you to update your status. I was only using one of those places since who has the time to go to six or seven different sites just to say “I’m heading home”, or “I’m at work”

Ping lets you enter an update in one place and then it pushes it down to any of the sites you choose. They have one or two sites you can send to. If you missed the sarcasm in that last sentence, here is the list: Bebo, Blogger, Brightkite, Custom URL, Facebook, FriendFeed, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, Kwippy, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo, Pulse. Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, WordPress.com, Xanga. So, as you can see, its more than just microblogging sites or status updates.

And one could completely configure this to do any number of things – you should really do to the site and check it out.

I decided, for right now, to just use it for updates. So I set it up to tell my Twitter, Plurk, and Facebook accounts whatever it is I was updating from the Ping web site. I tested it and sure enough, my Facebook status was updated and the entry was posted in both my Twitter and Plurk. I was a happy man! I need to try and figure out if I can have it update my GTalk status too, but I didn’t see that option at quick blush.

What’s that you say? Why have to go to another web site to update all these other web sites. Well, no need – you can enter you update from: AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk (GTalk), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, iGoogle Gadget, Facebook Application, iPhone Web App, Mobile App (WAP)

So I set Ping up as a friend in GTalk and then “chatted” a message to Ping and it posted it to all my sites.

All of this took me just under 15 minutes from sign up to set up to posting. The only thing I haven’t tried yet is to set up the iPhone Web App. I wanted to see how much I could do in 15 minutes so you can see, with all of these apps I keep writing about, how much can happen in that short amount of time.