Giving up on Ping.fm

After some reading, I think the situation at Ping.FM might be worse than I realized. After Ping.FM was acquired by Seesmic, they revoked all API access a while ago and I’m not sure that they’ll be fixing these issues anytime soon. It seems like Seesmic is focused on relaunching a paid app under the Seesmic Ping banner. That’s cool… for them, I guess. In the meantime, it would be nice if they provided their users with some direction and guidance.

For my part, I’ve now invested 45 minutes troubleshooting and trying to understand the situation better – that’s 45 minutes wasted if Seesmic is going to shut down Ping.FM. And, if they don’t have the courtesy to keep me in the loop now, I can’t really expect the situation will improve if I pay them money. In my experience, companies that offer great service don’t wait to show their stripes until you’ve ponied up some cash.

I was able to find a few WordPress plugins that offer similar functionality – a total PITA to install and configure, but not much more time on top of the time I’ve already wasted trying to solve this.

Updated: Since posting this, I’ve found WordSocial, a nice plugin that handles posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and wasn’t much of a hassle to install. I pulled the earlier plugins I was wrestling with and I’m quite pleased with the results.