Many of us being social animals have accounts on almost all popular social networking sites. Yes, almost all (don’t tell me you only have one account… I won’t believe you). As your online appearance grows, you become more busy with updating all your status on and uploading photos to these networks. For example, you had an awesome dinner in a restaurant, you want to share photos of the food to your friends. How many times do you need to upload the photos and your comments? Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku… And you may even have blogs to update as well. The more accounts you have, the less enjoyable sharing your life online becomes.
I like talking about automation. After my ifttt and Yahoo! Pipes posts, let me write another post about automating social network updates. In this post I’ll introduce some tools you can use to make one update and spread to the whole internet instantly.
Hellotxt – Publish to Popular Social Networking Sites On The Go
To use Hellotxt, you need to create accounts on the social sites by yourself and enter the login details into the system one by one. This is a painful process but once you get through it you would find Hellotxt very helpful.
The killer feature of Hellotxt is portability. It has iPhone and Android apps that allow you to make updates wherever you are. And it’s free. It connects to a wide variety of networks but unfortunately Google+ is not supported at the time of writing this post.
Official Site: http://hellotxt.com
Ping.fm – Update Social Sites at Once Easily
Basically Ping.fm works in a similar way as Hellotxt. The major difference is the former has a less fancy user interface and no smartphone app.
Ping.fm supports the following networks. Again, Google+ is not included.
Official Site: http://ping.fm
OnlyWire – Access to All Popular Social Networking Sites
This is how OnlyWire works. You enter your login credentials, you write new status update in OnlyWire, it sends the update to all the sites. You can update social networking sites such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also make new social bookmarks to Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. and blogs such as Tumblr and Posterous.
You enter your updates via a web interface. Then the information is sent to the submitter which is installed in your computer. The submitter will approach al social networking and bookmarking sites. You can see what works and what doesn’t, with an option to re-submit.
OnlyWire has a free option but with submission limit. To use the advanced features you need to pay a fee as low as $10 per month. I think OnlyWire is most suitable for companies and organizations that regularly publish news because of the price, web interface and the requirement of installing a submitter, although individual users would also find it useful if they mostly update their statuses via desktop computer (e.g. in the office).
Official Site: http://onlywire.com
PixelPipe – Content Syndication Across Social Sites
Compared with the above sites, Pixelpipe is more media content oriented. You can see from the list below that it’s main function is to upload multimedia content such as music, video and photos. If you like sharing photos, this is a handy tool you should try. It even supports Dropbox and Box.net so that you can backup the things you posted. There is also an option to email the content to a specific recipient. This provides great flexibility to content distribution.
Official Site: http://pixelpipe.com
Summary
There web apps should have covered almost all popular social networking sites. In most cases you don’t really need to use them all. Just use the one that supports the greatest number of social sites you have. I usually use Hellotxt only, because the more of these apps you use the more tedious account log-in input you have to do!
