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Three-way merge: Seesmic, Twhirl, and Ping.fm getting together

Seesmic video service gets an API, and Ping.fm and Twhirl make good use of it.

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Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman
2 min read

Two services I use, Twhirl and Ping.fm, and one I don't, Seesmic, are getting integrated this week in ways that will likely help all of the products.

First up, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur just announced that the multi-posting tool Ping.fm now supports Seesmic, a video microblog service. Seesmic has a new API, which has made it possible for the Ping.fm team to allow embed a recording function for Seesmic videos within Ping.fm. It's very simple to use the Ping.fm service now to create a Seesmic video, but the real benefit is that you can then easily post a link to the video on another micro-blog or social site, like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, or Plurk (or any combination of them), without visiting any of the sites themselves.

You can now record Seesmic videos within Ping.fm, but what I'm really looking forward to is the capability to post to Ping.fm from within Twhirl.

The AIR app Twhirl, primarily known as a Twitter client (although it also supports Seesmic and Friendfeed) is also getting related new features that should be released later this week. Taking advantage of the same Seesmic API that Ping.fm is using, the client will soon let you record Seesmic videos directly. The current version lets you watch, but not record, Seesmic vids.

Also coming to Twhirl in the upcoming release is support for Ping.fm: You'll be able to use the client as a front-end to your Ping.fm account, which means if you like the Ping.fm service (like I do) for its capability to multi-post items to several services at once, and also like the Twhirl service for reading your microblog feeds, soon you'll be able to take advantage of the Ping.fm functionality without actually leaving the Twhirl client.

Together, these three services make for a nice system for microbloggers, and the set-up makes it much more likely that a user of any two of the products will take up use of the third. I may just start using Seesmic, for example. I would like to see more interface and login integration between the services (you have to have accounts on all three to use them as I described), but for now, this is a very welcome improvement to them all.

Previously: The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload.