Brad first reviewed Ping.FM back in march, and the service has come a long way since then. Today, they announced that they're ready to do away with invites and open up the service to the public.

Before getting my beta code, I really wasn't all that interested in any of the microblog/status sites that exist. There are just too damn many of them, and I don't have time to update a dozen sites every time I read or post something interesting. Ping has made that chore so unbelievably easy that I'm now getting some use out of my Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Friendfeed, Rejaw, Facebook, and myriad other accounts.

Apart from using the dashboard on the Ping.FM website, you can also update via email or IM. All you have to do is add Ping as a buddy in your favorite app, enter a verification code, and any messages you send will be sent to your default list. If you're an iGoogle user, Ping's got a gadget for that, too. I've talked about their mobile version as well, which I love since it'll run on any old handheld with wifi access.

Ping is a great service, and I can't imagine trying to do manually what their service does for me. It's a winner.

There's no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty's main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also select the individual tab for each service to see recent updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they're available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we had with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there's no way to make it smaller. Bigger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]

It's no secret that Twitter goes down on occasion. But what are you gonna do if you just neeeeed to tweet?

The great minds at betaworks pondered that question as well and developed twitabit. A simple website that stores your messages and forwards them once Twitter is back up and running. Simply enter your username, password and message and you're off.

If you love Twitter so much that you haven't jumped ship, twitabit may be that life preserver you were waiting for.

Flock, the "Social Web Browser" built on the same Mozilla engine as Firefox, has launched the latest stable version, 1.2. The beta has been available for a while now.

In this version, Digg, Pownce, and AOL Mail integration. Digg and Pownce makes sense, but the AOL mail one didn't really excite us all that much.

It seems like Flock is stockpiling partners and features though and are putting together a very nice user experience "out of the box" that other browsers can't offer.

Firefox is perfect for the ubergeek that wants to install his or her own extensions, but for someone like our mothers or aunts who just want to try out this new fangled web thing, Flock is the answer.

Plus, the browser's blog editor is still the killerest app out there for any browser.

The knock on Flock has been stability which we haven't seen issues with on Windows or Mac, but the loadtime for first startup is a known issue that they're working on.

They recently won a Webby award for "Best in Social Networking" which is actually quite impressive considering that they were up against Facebook.

Go give Flock a shot and let us know what you think.

Do you want your web browsing experience to be social?

If you have half a dozen social networks and microblogs that you like to update simultaneously, you probably need to go outside and get some fresh air. But before you do that, you can post an update to let all your friends know that you're going outside to get some fresh air using HelloTxt.

Last time we looked on on the site, you could post messages to 10 different services including Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku. And that was about all you could do. But now the service has rolled out a new feature that lets you post images and videos. Well, sort of. You can upload an image to the HelloTxt server and get a shortened URL to place in your message so that anyone can click through and see the image. But HelloTxt doesn't actually host the videos. You'll need to copy the embed code from another site like YouTube or Vimeo. You do still get a shortened URL that you can send out to friends, so there's some value in the video feature. Just not as much as we'd like.

Somewhat ironically, while HelloTxt will give you shortened URLs for videos and images, there's no option to shorten a regular URL, so you'll have to rely on old standbys like TinyURL if you just want to share a link.

[via Go2Web2.0]

Pownce, the social network that's all about sharing with your friends, just made sharing a whole lot easier. Now you can grab an RSS feed of all your incoming Pownce messages, for more convenient reading. This is cool, but RSS is par for the course on social networks these days. It would be bigger news if Pownce still didn't have it.

What is actually quite unique about Pownce is the variety of video and photo hosting sites it now supports. If you post a video link to Pownce -- under the link tab, not as a regular post -- it will now display inline on your Pownce page. This goes for the big players in online video, like Vimeo, Viddler, YouTube and the new Flickr Video, as well as a smattering of other sites. CollegeHumor video support seems sort of arbitrary, but hey, we guess some people watch it.

[via Mashable]

Ping.fm is a new service that lets you update a bunch of social network/messaging sites all at once. Instead of logging into Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, and Tumblr and manually posting updates, you can just visit Ping.fm and write a single message which will be sent to each site. So far, it sounds a lot like HelloTXT, right? Well, it is, but Ping.fm has a few features that make it a lot more useful than HelloTXT.

First of all, you can post updates via email. When you sign up for a Ping.fm account you'll be assigned an email address. Just send a message to that address and the message will show up on all of your linked accounts. You can also enable an IM update option. Right now you need to have an AOL Instant Messenger account to use the IM posting option. But you don't have to use the official AIM client. As you can see in our screenshot, Pidgin works just as well, as should Adium, Trillian, Meebo or Digsby.

Ping.fm is still in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to giveaway. Just enter the code dls on the signup page.

[via Mashable]

Twhirl 0.7.1 was released this week and the desktop Twitter client has some major new features. First, the new version runs on Adobe AIR 1.0, so you don't need to have the old beta version of AIR installed to run it. But we're much more excited about the other new features including the ability to cross-post to Pownce and Jaiku.

If you provide your Pownce and Jaiku login information in the settings tab, any time you send a message to Twitter, the message will automatically go to your other micro-blogging services as well. You won't see replies from your Pownce or Jaiku contacts in Twhirl, but as far as baby steps go, this one's a doozy.

Twhirl 0.7.1 also includes additional color schemes, the ability to choose your URL shortening service (either Snurl or is.gd) and the ability to mark messages as read.

Have you been so busy sending angry letters to Saturday Night Live about their choice of actors to portray Barack Obama that you've fallen behind on your Download Squad reading? Not to worry. Here's a roundup of some of the stories you might have missed this week:

Download Squad at Future of Web Apps

Download Squad's Grant Robertson hit up the Future of Web Apps 2008 conference in Miami this week. And he's been kind of busy. Here are just a few of the topics he's covered or live-blogged:

• Scaling Web Applications
• Google's Kevin Marks and the future of APIs
• Bringing a Web App to the masses
• Adding new features to existing applications
• Leah Culver of Pownce on the future of web services
• Launch an app in 40 minutes
• How to grow a community in the future

DivX shuts down Stage6 online video site

This week DivX shut down the online video sharing site Stage6. The web service never got as much attention as YouTube, DailyMotion. But it was a favorite among online video connaisseurs for its excellent video quality. DivX is now directing users to check out online video site Veoh.

TotalEdit 4.1: Text editor for programmers

TotalEdit is an advanced text editor with programs that could come in handy for coders, including syntax-coloring, code-folding, and line-numbering. There's also a portable version you can run from a USB drive. But one of the best things about this article is the fact that a bunch of readers weighed in with their favorite text editors in the comments.

After a long invite-only beta, and a recent general-public release, Pownce has finally released their full-blown API that allows 3rd-party applications to post to the Pownce service. Back in our initial run-down of Pownce, the lack of a complete API was one of our major criticisms of the initial launch, and the basic Pownce API that's been around for a fair while merely allowed 'reading' of API data, not the 'posting' of updates. This meant you had to use either the mobile or Pownce websites, or the Adobe Integrated Runtime application, which some of us are less than fond of.

For better or worse, competitor Twitter has always stayed ahead of Pownce with a more comprehensive API (something that in our opinion made the Pownce/Twitter debate a one-horse-race until now) and now that Pownce is fully open to the developer masses, it'll certainly be interesting to see what applications appear. Talking of which, the first that we've seen is a rather handy 'Pownce it!' bookmarklet for quickly and easily sending links to your Pownce account. Sweet!

Pownce developer Leah Culver, apologizing for the delay to the API, says "We've taken great care to provide the best experience for developers". Given Twitter's continuing instability, it'll be interesting to see developers put the Pownce API through its paces, and see whether Twitter's instability will eventually begin to undermine the API-headstart that's attracted so many users (not to mention developers) to the service.

[Tip of the hat to Download Squad alumnus David Chartier for pointing out the bookmarklet]

Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka. Pownce is a "social messaging" service which allows you to share updates, files, links and more with your friends, and (now) provides a robust API to work with your data. Here are the rough cut of our notes from her presentation at FOWA 2008.

HelloTxt makes it easy to make sure all of your friends know what you're up to all the time, no matter what social networking services they use. Actually, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but HelloTxt does let you post messages simultaneously to a whole slew of social networking sites that allow you to frequently update your status.

You don't need to register for an account to use HelloTxt, but as you've probably guessed, you do need to enter your login information for your various social networking sites. If you do register for an account, you only have to enter this data once, and then you can broadcast your updates to your hearts content. Registered users can also see a timeline with your latest updates and responses from their friends.

[via makeuseof]

As of 12 AM PST, Pownce, the Twitter-esque social messaging tool created by Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka and Leah Culver, leaves private beta and becomes open to the public. Pownce became open to a limited group of users in June of 2007 and has thus far amassed 150,000 users.

Although the developer has repeatedly claimed that Pownce is "not a Twitter clone," it is hard to look at the two services and not see the similarities. Both offer a way to send a message to a large group of people at the same time and have similar friend/follower structures.

The differences are that while Twitter can be highly integrated with mobile devices and SMS messaging, Pownce can only be used from the web site or the Adobe AIR client. However, Pownce allows user the ability to share files (up to 10 MB for free users, 100 MB for Premium users), invitations and set-up personalized groups. When Pownce goes live, it will also make it easy to import friends from services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.


Several of us here at DownloadSquad have been playing with Pownce on and off for quite some time, and while we think the service show considerable promise, Twitter still has our heart. The inability to use Pownce from an IM client or SMS outweigh the benefits of being able to share a file (we prefer e-mail or a link to a service like box.net anyway) or send out a group invitation. We do like the grouping feature and really wish that Twitter would implement somethign similar.

In the end, for us, it will all come down to what service our friends are using. As of right now, all of our friends are on Twitter; however, now that Pownce is open to the public, that could change. Check out Pownce and tell us what you think.

Two of our main issues with Pownce, the Twitter and Jaiku-like social web service, have been their lack of mobile support and the absence of an API. Well, back in October they fixed the API issue and it seems now that Pownce has a mobile client.

It seems Kevin Rose and friends have been busy developing m.pownce.com in a very quiet way. We tried m.pownce.com on our mobile and it is very slick. You can post messages, events, and links, but not pictures at this time.

To use the pownce mobile client, simply fire up your mobile phone browser and go to http://m.pownce.com .

A killer feature, in our opinion, would be to allow mobile users to upload pictures taken on a mobile phone for all our pownce friends to see.

Pownce, the easy way to send out goodies to friends has announced a few new helpful features.

• Sending brief snippets of text, images, photos and links just got a little easier with Pownce's new updates. Besides beefing up the system to run faster, the team has integrated in:
• Event notifications - the most recent five upcoming events you have been sent will appear on the right hand side of the screen.
• Inline video playback, image previews - YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Revver, and Vimeo videos as well as images from Zoomr will be automatically embedded in your notes for quick viewing abilities. Images from Photobucket and Flickr will be added in the future. (Why Pownce wouldn't start off with Flickr, we don't know, they are only the top image hosting provider.)
• Social network profile display - Profile where else you are on the web. Easily link to your other profiles online, including Digg, Last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, IM id's, and links to your websites and blogs.
• Preference settings - Open links in a new window by default, and customize note and reply features.

The one thing that keeps us wondering, where's the API? Twitter, the competition has theirs out and people are doing some great things with it, but when can we expect some consumer integrated mashups from you? However, Pownce is on the move to distinguish themselves as a true quick message player.