Ping.fm manages status updates

During last week's interview with MaryPat Kavanagh and Michele PW, the question arose about how to efficiently and effectively manage all your social networking sites. If you're participating on MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., this can take a lot of time.

Each of the social sites mentioned above have an option for you to update your status, meaning what you are doing at that moment. Why would you do this?

Updating your status on a daily (or minute by minute) basis alerts those who follow you that you're active and participating in the conversation. But that's a lot of sites to update.

Enter ping.fm. You set up an account. Enter your log in info for each site you want to update. You enable your ping account and you're good to go. You can either update your status from your ping account or, like I do, enable the application on your Facebook account and update from inside Facebook. When I do that, my status update is immediately posted on the accounts I've set up: MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Ping.fm is in beta and you need an invitation to get set up. If you want an invite code, post a comment here and I'll send it to you.

If you're using ping.fm, what do you think? Is it working for you?