With so many social networks gaining traction, the potential for communities to be split and conversations diversified is a known issue. Aiming to solve the problem and ensure users could update once and populate anywhere, Sean McCullough, along with co-founder Adam Duffy, created Ping.fm, which lets you update 50 social networks at once.Today, Seesmic, the well-known microblogging client, which to date has focused on Twitter and Facebook, acquired the service, extending the product's reach. In combination with Seesmic's recent inroads to a native Windows client and an Android application, alongside their Web interface and AIR application, the service looks to become ubiquitous, updating any site from anywhere.
In today's announcement, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur said that the company's vision recognizes that friends "are not all in one social network, but we want to help you stay in touch with them anytime and from any device." Ping.fm has a reported half a million active users, who post approximately 200,000 updates daily. These updates will contribute to Seesmic's stated goal of one million updates a day in 2010.
At LeWeb, in the Twitter Apps panel I moderated (video here), Sean McCullough of Ping.fm and Marco Kaiser of Seesmic both participated.
Seesmic's array of applications, including BlackBerry, will all soon have what Loic termed "advanced Ping.fm integration very shortly", adding that users could update not just with Seesmic's apps, but also through Ping.fm's e-mail, SMS and chat gateways.
To date, Seesmic has been seen as direct competition to the other major column-based Twitter client, TweetDeck. But while TweetDeck has taken a slower approach to new interfaces, holding on to its AIR installs and iPhone application, Seesmic looks like it is branching ahead, serving more screens and now, more networks.