I used to use ping.fm to update all of my places online. It usually went to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, my Gmail status, and maybe 1 or 2 other places. One of the things that I liked about ping, was that it was a one stop shop, and they had an app for my Iphone. I just hit the button and boom I was uploading text and sometimes pictures. One picture at a time, but still it wasn’t too bad. It’s url shortening service worked well on twitter. Life was good.
Then ping.fm started having problems posting links on my facebook. For some reason when a ping.fm URL was used, Facebook would not summarize the article below the post like it does for normal URLs. My initial thought was that this was a problem of facebook. I tried to post a URL on facebook and it worked fine. OK, so it’s a problem with the ping.fm links. Another thing that always annoyed me about ping.fm was that it compressed photo’s. That was fine for places like facebook and twitter that did that anyway. But I had photos being uploaded to my flickr as well. flickr allows very, very large per picture uploads, there was no reason for compression.
So I put out a request on facebook asking my friends and family if they knew any alternatives to ping.fm . My brother Jeff responded with a link to pixelpipe . pixelpipe is a service that allows you to upload photos, as well as post text updates to the same sites that ping.fm does. It even had a place where you could update ping.fm , so if I really wanted to, I could feed my pixelpipe into ping.fm . I decided to give it a try.
The first thing I noticed about pixelpipe was how EASY it was to upload full quality pictures. I mean all I had to do was run through the pictures, select them by clicking on them, and hit the upload button. Boom. They hit twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr, everywhere at once. It was awesome. The only down side i could see to pixelpipe was that when I posted things that were too long to twitter, they did not shorten the url. In fact it cut the URL off in the middle if it was too long. For me, that was a deal breaker. I kept using ping.fm on my Iphone.
Well ping.fm pissed me off again today. It cut off something I had posted to facebook. So I decided it was time to look into pixelpipe again to see if they had a url shortening service yet. What I discovered was that they did not have a URL shortener for links, however if your twitter post ran over the allotted number of letters, it would post a link back to their website that contained all of your update. Even if it was too long. This is not the same as URL shortening, but it is good enough in my book that I can use it in place of ping.fm from now on.
