Ping.fm is a great little tool to update all your statuses at once: Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and more. I’ve been using it for some time and decided I’d like to integrate it into my personal blog, so all my friends can see my latest posts without me having to go and manually submit it to Ping.fm for everyone to see. I found 2 great plugins: CR Post to Ping.fm & Shorten2Ping. Both worked great until Seesmic (that recently bought Ping.fm from its creators), decided to suspend the application developer’s API accounts. This means that these 2 great plugins stopped working! WTH Seesmic? I had long respected you as a company, now I’m not so sure… In fact I’m considering removing the Seesmic app from my Android phone in protest. Please fix this Seesmic. Even if you need to implement something like Twitter & Facebook, where we can each create our own app, them paste those keys into these great plugins. Just do something! Fix it, don’t pretend like its not a problem. You’re losing fans and followers.
Ping.fm won’t even work in Chrome now. I get a “This webpage has a redirect loop.” error. The pingbot in my Gmail chat (which I use to update my status the most) isn’t working either.
UPDATE: after receiving Yama’s comment below, I messed with my cookies in Chrome and am now able to access Ping.fm.ping
UPDATE 2: I use Buffer and the WordPress plugin WP to Buffer, for this sort of thing now.
UPDATE 3: Seesmic was acquired by Hootsuite in 2012 and absorbed into it. Ping.fm did not survive the transition.
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….