Enter Ping.fm. I can’t really remember who it was that first turned me on to this glorious website, but it was love at first sight. Like a lot of you, being a bleeding edge adopter of all things web 2.0 and social media, I had amassed more than my fair share of social networking accounts. I rarely, if ever, visited any of them. But I kept collecting these accounts every time a new service came out. Certainly there had to be an easy way to manage all of them?

Ping.fm allows you to cross-post status updates to most, if not all, of your social networking sites. The only social networking website I was visiting on an even semi-regular basis was Facebook.com. What Ping.fm allowed me to do was add all my social networking sites, including Twitter, and update all of them with a click of the mouse. Sweet!

How I started Twittering more is this: in late February, my 84-year-old mother (who lives with my wife and I in Chesapeake, VA) had a heart attack. As I sat in the hospital waiting for word from the doctors, all I could think to do was post updates to my social networking sites via Ping.fm on my iPhone. Imagine my surprise when I started receiving responses not only from my Facebook friends, but also from total strangers expressing empathy and concern on Twitter!

Since then, I’ve discovered the joys of Tweetdeck (via Chris J. and Donna A.) and life has never been the same! As you can see from the first chart, my Twitter use has gone through the roof in the months of February and March! And now, Tweetdeck has integrated the ability to update your Facebook status as well as read the status updates of your Facebook friends. It just doesn’t get much sweeter than that!

Yeah, I’m using Ping.fm less and less these days, but to tell you the truth, Facebook and Twitter are the only sites I really use anyway. It would be cool if Tweetdeck could do what Ping.fm does, but it doesn’t really matter all that much to me. Not really.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0,social networking,Ping.fm,Twitter,communication,Facebook,Tweetdeck,website

In either case, this is my first blog post in over seven months. I’m hoping to get the creative juices flowing again!

Technorati Tags: followers,ideas,depth,topics

• del.icio.us – for managing favorites (my feed here)
• Joe’s Goals – for managing goals
• LibraryThing – for managing my extensive library (check out my books here)

What tools do you use?

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