After about a week of getting the great opportunity to test out Ping.fm, I wanted to take a few to post a quick review of my experience w/the service so far.

With the never ending growth of social media/networking sites, it becomes impossible to maintain all of these sites with current information. Ping.fm simplifies this problem for overly social internet whores. Until I discovered ping.fm, I was only using Facebook, and just discovering Twitter. I simply refused to join all of the sites that "everyone" found popular. But since I am using Ping.fm now, I have joined up with about 10 total social sites!

Ping.fm simply allows you to post status updates, micro-blogs and full blogs all at once to multiple sites, simply incorporating the APIs for all of the "major" social sites.

When you update/edit/add services to your account, you are presented with very simple options as seen below from the twitter update page.

By selecting "Status updates" and/or "Micro-blogging", you are able to classify Twitter (and all other services) into groups so that you don't have to post to them all at once.... You could put Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk in your "Status updates" category, and leave a site like Pownce in the group for micro-blogging. Currently, I'm just updating the crap out of all the sites I'm on, and will likely customize my Ping.fm setup later using these features.

Using the posting tips provided by ping.fm, you can also post to a single service rather than a whole group, or all of them using triggers and service triggers.

It is also possible to post updates to ping.fm using services like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, from a gadget from your iGoogle custom page, and more!

Ping.fm also will auto-shrink URLs you post to shorten the overall length of your submissions.

All in all, Ping.fm is a great service that is sure to be a massive hit across the globe for fans of social networking. Currently you need a beta code to be allowed access, and at the time of this writing, a valid beta code would be "vivalaping". I highly recommend this service, and will be watching closely for future updates & information on how thier business model plays out over the course of time, and as the service becomes fully public.

Keep up the good work!!!