When social media exploded, managing multiple accounts became a challenge for users. Enter Ping.fm, a nifty tool created by Seesmic that allowed users to update their statuses across various platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and many more, all at once. For those juggling multiple social media accounts, Ping.fm was a lifesaver. It streamlined content sharing, saved time, and made it easier to maintain a consistent online presence. I found Ping.fm incredibly useful and used it for quite some time. However, my journey with it under Seesmic’s ownership had its ups and downs, leading me to search for alternative solutions.
Integrating Ping.fm with My Blog
At some point, I decided I wanted to connect Ping.fm with my personal blog. My goal was to automate sharing so that my friends and readers could see my latest blog posts without needing me to manually submit them to Ping.fm. This automation would save me time and ensure consistency across my social media channels. After doing some research, I found two promising plugins for WordPress: CR Post to Ping.fm and Shorten2Ping. These plugins allowed me to post content directly from my blog to Ping.fm, and in turn, Ping.fm would push it out to all my connected accounts. It was perfect—until things took a turn for the worse.
The Disappointment with Seesmic
In 2010, Seesmic acquired Ping.fm from its original creators, a move that initially seemed promising. However, shortly after the acquisition, Seesmic made a decision that would impact users like me: they suspended the application developer’s API accounts. The consequence? Both CR Post to Ping.fm and Shorten2Ping stopped working! This was a massive blow, as these plugins were the backbone of my automation setup. Without the ability to connect through the API, there was no way to send updates automatically to Ping.fm.
This unexpected change led to considerable frustration. Seesmic’s lack of support or communication about these plugins felt dismissive. The suspension of API accounts meant that developers had no way to maintain or update the tools that made Ping.fm so valuable to bloggers and social media enthusiasts. The disruption was severe enough that I even considered removing the Seesmic app from my Android phone in protest.
A Plea to Seesmic: Fix the Problem
The frustration wasn’t just mine—many users were vocal about the problem, urging Seesmic to restore or replace the API access. Even if it required implementing a system similar to Twitter and Facebook, where individual users create their own API keys, it would have been a step in the right direction. Ignoring the issue only alienated loyal users and put Seesmic’s reputation at risk. Users like me felt that Seesmic should acknowledge the problem and find a solution. Doing nothing would only result in a loss of fans and followers.
On top of these plugin issues, Ping.fm also stopped working in Google Chrome. Users began experiencing a “This webpage has a redirect loop” error when attempting to access the site. To make matters worse, the Pingbot in my Gmail chat—a handy tool for updating my status directly through chat—also stopped working. With these compounding problems, it became clear that Ping.fm was quickly losing its reliability.
Searching for Alternatives: Adapting to Change
After the setbacks with Ping.fm, I started searching for alternatives that would provide the same level of functionality. I stumbled upon Buffer, a social media management tool designed to schedule and automate posts across multiple platforms. Buffer proved to be an effective replacement, allowing me to maintain my automation setup. Even better, the WordPress plugin WP to Buffer made it easy to integrate Buffer with my blog, fulfilling the same purpose as the now-defunct Ping.fm plugins.
The End of Ping.fm and Seesmic’s Legacy
By 2012, the situation had changed drastically. Seesmic, facing its challenges, was eventually acquired by Hootsuite, a dominant player in social media management. With this acquisition, Ping.fm was absorbed into Hootsuite, but unfortunately, it did not survive the transition. For users like me who had relied on Ping.fm for years, this marked the end of an era. Hootsuite offered many features, but Ping.fm’s simplicity and unique integration capabilities were lost.
Lessons Learned: Staying Adaptable in a Changing Digital World
The rise and fall of Ping.fm taught me an essential lesson about the digital landscape: adaptability is crucial. In an industry where tools and platforms can change hands, get acquired, or even disappear, relying on a single solution can leave you vulnerable. As much as I loved Ping.fm, its demise pushed me to explore new options like wpXPRESS, which offered more stability and support.
Today, I look back on my time with Ping.fm fondly. It was one of the first tools that taught me the value of automation in social media management and opened my eyes to the power of integrating platforms seamlessly. While Ping.fm is now just a memory, the lessons it imparted remain relevant. When a tool you depend on fails or disappears, find a replacement that keeps you moving forward.
If you’re currently using a single tool to manage your online presence, consider having a backup or exploring additional options. The digital world is constantly evolving, and being prepared for changes can save you time, energy, and headaches down the road.
Hi, Tevya. First of all, thanks for sharing, and I apologize for all the frustrations you’re going through. We’re currently undergoing some restructuring to improve ping.fm. We’ve had to disable some of the plugins to address suspicious activity and at the same time, address some key performance issues. Although we don’t have an ETA, our team is working hard and we’re all really looking forward to a new and improved Ping.fm very soon. Please feel free to email me at yama [at] seesmic [dot] com. Thanks!
I emailed Yama, in response to his comment, which I very much appreciate. Here’s what I said:
Yama,
Thanks for your response. It shows me Seesmic does care, in spite of my doubts. I’m honestly a little surprised you even found my blog at all (its fairly new).
I look forward to the updates, and hope they will allow and empower these two great plugins (and others like them) to continue in the future. For more information on the issues and the frustration of some people (including the developers of these plugins), take a look at these two threads:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/shorten2ping-no-longer-working?replies=37
http://crwpplugins.userecho.com/feedback/6289-api-key-suspended-what-does-it-means/
Hello Tevya, I’m the CEO of Seesmic, nice to meet you and thank you for reporting this. Our problem is that there has been huge spam usage and abuse using the ping api and those plugins. Ping being a free service the huge spam meant complains from our social network partners and huge processing costs for us so we had to be careful, remember ping is a free service and free+open is a spammers heaven.
We’re working on finding a solution but please don’t call us evil when it’s all the opposite we’re solidifying ping and integrating it fully into seesmic while it has been sometimes unreliable, we want a total quality service, but also not be the heaven of spamers. Hope you understand.
Thank you for your response. I had no idea my post would get this kind of attention. But I’m glad it did, because its allowed you to set the record straight. The developers of those plugins were frustrated because the replies they were getting from Ping.fm support and Seesmic didn’t seem to indicate that Seesmic cared about Ping.fm or its loyal, honest (not spammer types), users. Its great to hear that even the CEO is concerned about this issue to the degree that would take time to comment on my lowly personal blog. It goes to show that I was exactly wrong in my original post. Thanks for straightening things out. I’ll try to pass the word to those plugin developers, who I’m sure will also be glad to hear you’re taking a personal interest in this.
Hi Loic,
I’m Shorten2Ping (WordPress plugin) author.
Disabling an entire app (or plugin) because **some** users makes an abuse is not the solution.
Even more when to use the plugin you need TWO keys, API key (for the app) and USER key (for identifying the user).
If you see an USER abusing, it’s ok… go and block the USER key, not the APP key.
But you go to the easy way, blocking entire APPS, no matter if most people using the app are not abusing.
I used to be a Ping.fm fan, but not anymore, not with a company that only takes care of themselves.
Your points make good sense to me. I’ve gotten a couple of email responses from Yama and another Seesmic employee. However, Yama indicated that Loic or somebody else would address your concerns. It was surprising to see their burst of interest. I wonder if they’ll actually come back here and respond further? Or perhaps just let the updates to Ping.fm speak for themselves (they better be as good as they’re insinuating).
I was in contact with a member of Seesmic support a while ago (when the forum post at wordpress.org was created), you can see in that forum post the reply she gave me. And you’ll see exactly the same response that they bring only a day ago “we’re working on it”.
But while they’re (supposedly) working, thousand of users are banned from using many apps (not only my plugin) without a valid reason.
Other services, with much better way of handling customer (and developer) care, have spam too (i.e. Twitter) but they don’t ban the app, they ban the users. Can you imagine Twitter banning Tweetdeck because a lot of people uses it for making spam??
Seesmic is a poor company in that way. They want to be a great company, but a great company requires a great open mind, and they don’t have it.
Hahaha, true!
I’m the developer of CR Post2PingFM and I’ve been contacting with ping.fm / seesmic support since the first time my app blocked. I do complain, why don’t the you only block ‘user key’. Becaseu, this way, legitimate user can’t use my plugin.
In the sense of competition, I port my plugin over to hellotxt, so that legitimate user (and off course, spammer too *sigh*) can use it to broadcast their post to social network.
Find it here: bayu.freelancer.web.id/blogfiles/cr-hellotxt-extended.zip
This is the official post for porting my ping.fm plugin to hellotxt: http://bayu.freelancer.web.id/2011/02/16/crpost2pingfm-plugin-ported-to-crhellotxtextended/
can someone please email me when the api works again? morgantg AT gmail or twitter @realtmo Thanks.
I’ll post an update here in the comments when we know more. Plus perhaps Samuel or Yama will as well. You’ll be updated if you subscribed to the comments.
I was surprised when shorten2ping stopped working as I pretty much relied on it and trying to find another solution has proven to be fruitless. I’m going to try the hellotxt plugin and see how that works out. I’ll check back here to see if there’s any updates, but considering this issue has been going on for many months, I doubt we’ll see anything anytime soon (I hope I’m wrong).
I was a little surprised to see Loic and Yama personally respond too. I suppose that’s a good sign.
Wow. So glad you got an answer from higher-ups at Seesmic. And yet, Ping.fm is not functioning at all today.
A few months back, Ping.fm support for Xanga just stopped. Neither Xanga nor Seesmic ever answer why.
It is not clear how to report issues to Seesmic via their Ping.fm forum. Since you got some feedback, I thought I’d post my issue here.
I really hope this outage is temporary. I’ve used Ping.fm in the U.S. and overseas to post: One text goes everywhere.
we have stabilized basic performance, normal posting by email and other means should be good now. You don’t see it but lots of work on the architecture to make it stable and reliable. More soon.
Loic, I really appreciate you coming on here and responding. I am the designer and webmaster for a growing multi-author site. We’re doing it with no funding (didn’t seek any) so the site has to be “automatic” as much as possible. We had hoped to use Samuel’s plugin with ping.fm to automatically post each author’s new posts to the various social networks we’re connected to. Without that plugin, authors may or may not remember to publicize their posts. So we’d be thrilled if you could approve the app’s API so it would work again, once you have the service stable enough to do that.
So I have tried to login to my Ping.fm account over the last week or so, and keep getting the following error on the page – if anyone could asnwer this I would be most gratefull;
CONTENT ENCODING ERROR
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
This will be a complete travisty if they have one completely – anyone know anything?
@Tevya,
Many thanks for posting this complaint about Seesmic and Ping.fm. I’m glad to see them replying back even if progress is slow.
I thought I had found a good ping.fm wordpress plugin called Publish 2 Ping.fm which seems to work but even then it looks like it’s buggy (not passing links).
It also seems ping.fm isn’t even working properly with some of the other social networks. Is anyone else have problems with ping working with posterous, plurk, jaiku and others?
I used OnlyWire for a while. Works good, but not if you are scheduling posts, which is a requirement for my clients.
Ping.fm was a perfect solution for WP users months ago. Unfortunately for those of us who are legitimate users those days are gone. We don’t fall into the Ping.fm list of priorities, regardless of what they write. Otherwise, a solution would have been put in place. Lets face it, its just not that difficult, doing it is the tough part. Ping.fm has other goals, and one can’t argue against that. Just does not help us.
All of these services are heading in the direction of you making the posts on their site, and they feed where ever you wish, wordpress includes. I’m not interested in that. Clients then has to learn yet another interface. There is a wide open opportunity for a coder smarter than I!
Well I was very impressed with Seesmic’s response to this post. It seemed they were doing good things, and even the CEO was willing to come here and post to help explain things. Unfortunately as the weeks roll by, additional points have been made, and they have not returned to continue the conversation. Nor has their been any apparent updates to Ping.fm. As it stands now, the GTalk chat I usually use to update all my statuses has been offline for days. So not only is the features that allow the WordPress plugin to function unavailable, but it seems other features are going offline as well.
I must conclude that as I initially said “Seesmic is Ruining Ping.fm.” Feel free to continue venting your frustrations here.
I wish this great thread had continued. It seemed to be getting somewhere.
Have you found any solutions inside or outside of ping.fm?
I wish it had continued as well Heidi. Seismic acted as though updates were coming soon that would fix everything. However, I assume that since no such changes have come, that is why they haven’t returned to comment further. They don’t want to have to publicly eat their words.
I’m really liking the plugin Social by CrowdFavorite and MailChimp. It’s pretty cool and not only updates Facebook (page or profile) and Twitter, it also pulls in replies to those posts and makes them comments on your blog. Worth checking out, though it’s limited to only Facebook/Twitter for the time being (I’m hoping for Google+ integration, but no word on that).
Any ideas why Ping.fm plugin in my Genesis/WordPress website works, but not on one of my client’s site also on the Genesis/WordPress framework/platform? I get “Could not establish connection with URL” error. Tried generating a new key and even uninstalling/reinstalling the Ping.fm Custom URL plugin (by Matt Jacob).
On Jan 24th the hootsuite > ping.fm > facebook
linkage broke down. Some ping.fm posts do penetrate facebook, on occasion.
What is up?
P.S.
We use hootsuite > ping.fm > facebook
in order to post publications-ads to facebook pages, which for years now worked fine:)
Possibly Facebook is restricting something but there are issues unclear e.g. as to ping.fm recognizing facebook pages.
yeah, disappointed that the apps we’ve grown to depend on will no longer work via Ping, a great and useful plugin. i will move on to other sources, and not use Seesmic.
seesmic is my blog soul….