App of the Day: Ping.fm

New social networking services pop up almost as fast an individual can dream them up. With such proliferation, it is increasingly hard for a person to manage multiple accounts – overwhelmingly difficult in some cases. Thankfully a site named Ping.fm exists to make it much easier to wrangle updates to most of the popular and many of the lesser-known services.

In an effort to make using Ping.fm even easier from a webOS device, developer Erik C. Thauvin has created an app called, appropriately, Ping.fm. The app, just like the service, allows you to update multiple social networks with one single post. Alternately, the app allows you to update individual social networks in a singular pane via a drop-down selection.

A great feature of the Ping.fm service is the ability to create ‘posting groups’ which can be separated into service types like ‘micro-blogs’ (e.g. Twitter, Google Buzz), ‘statuses’ (e.g. Facebook), and ‘Blogs’ (e.g. WordPress.com). This feature is supported in the Ping.fm app, making it a broad-scope method for managing most of, if not all of, a user’s social media networks.

While the Ping.fm app does not provide a way to view the posts once they’ve been sent out or to consume information from social networks, this is simply not the purpose of the app nor the Ping.fm service. That being said, both the service and by extension the app are incredibly powerful tools and are a must have for webOS social-media addicts to manage their on line lives. The app is available for download right now in the Palm App Catalog and, like the service, it is free!