14 DAY TRIAL // The social networking app land is about to get a lot more interesting with the confirmed acquisition of Ping.fm by Seesmic. This move enables users to update their status on 50 social networks, thanks to Ping.fm's large catalogue of supported services. The plan is now to integrate the two services and add some Ping.fm functionality to the Seesmic desktop and mobile clients.
"Your friends are not all in one social network, but we want to help you stay in touch with them anytime and from any device. That is Seesmic's vision and to deliver this faster, we have acquired Ping.fm. You can now update 50 social networks using Seesmic+Ping.fm from email, chat, sms, Blackberry, Android, web, Windows, OSX and much more soon," Seesmic announced on its blog.
A great thing about social networking site is that they foster a huge ecosystem of apps and services which sprung up around them to cater to various needs unmet by the proper service. One type of apps which has proven very popular are the desktop and mobile clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic which first catered to Twitter user but soon expanded to support Facebook and others. It enables users to update their status and keep in touch on the go or without opening up a browser window. It also enables them to handle several accounts from several social networking sites all in one app.
"You can definitely expect to see full integration of our services into all Seesmic clients within a few weeks... We will be also improving the core service to provide more requested features and more ridiculous, infinite awesome that you all have been asking for," the Ping.fm blog reads.
Ping.fm already has more than 500,000 users which post over 200,000 status updates every day. It also has an open API so about 100 apps rely on it in one way or another to provide the status updates to various social networks. The influx of new users should help Seesmic reach its goal for 2010 to have 1 million status updates per day. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks it was more of a stock swap deal rather than a cash one.