We've acquired Ping.fm. Get ready to update 50 social networks from Seesmic
Your friends are not all in one social network, but we want to help you stay in touch with them anytime and from any device. That is Seesmic's vision and to deliver this faster, we have acquired Ping.fm.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Loic Le Meur's second buy, and it rhymes with the first: in 2008 Seesmic picked up the Twhirl Twitter client, converting a rival AIR app into its desktop beachhead. Since then the company — funded with $5.5 million of its $6 million round from Atomico's Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis — has been widening the same client beyond Twitter, launching a dedicated Facebook desktop app in March 2009 and adding Facebook Pages management to Seesmic Desktop 0.6 that September.
First-order effects
- Ping.fm's broadcast-to-many service now sits inside Seesmic's product line, giving Seesmic users posting reach across roughly 50 social networks rather than the Twitter-and-Facebook pair it had built toward through 2009.
- The deal lands on day four of 2010 with immediate press pickup — TechCrunch ran the story the same day — so Le Meur gets the attention he says he measures by numbers, not hype.
Second-order effects
- Rival multi-account clients such as TweetDeck and HootSuite now face a competitor whose differentiator is network breadth plus an owned distribution API (Ping.fm), pushing them to deepen their own cross-network integrations.
- Social networks themselves lose a little more control of their own posting interfaces: when updates flow through an aggregator, membership in the aggregator matters more than loyalty to any single network.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the durable position in social software is the aggregation layer between users and networks — the same structure that turns standalone clients like Seesmic into acquisition targets for social media management platforms.
- Client makers become de facto gatekeepers of the 'write' side of the social web, a role regulators and networks have yet to define terms around.
The trend: Social clients are consolidating from single-network apps into cross-network publishing hubs, with acquisitions like Twhirl and Ping.fm assembling breadth faster than organic development could.