Seesmic's acquisition of Ping.fm opens door to more social networks

January 13, 2010 — 2:13pm ET | By Sharon Fisher

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Ping.fm was acquired last week by Seesmic, which said it plans to incorporate the Ping functionality into all of its applications. Ping.fm lets its half-million users update posts on more than 50 social networks--including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn--at once through SMS, mobile applications, instant messaging services and third-party applications that support the services. The company's founders, Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, have joined Seesmic as full-time employees

What was unusual about Ping.fm is that it started in Tulsa, Okla.--an area that is not exactly thought of as a hotbed of technological innovation. According to the newspaper Tulsa World, the founders had been members of the Collaboratorium, an entrepreneurial resource center located in downtown Tulsa, since its opening in May 2009. The center is the self-proclaimed entrepreneurial accelerator of Tulsa.

The London Telegraph noted that the acquisition gives Seesmic, which had focused primarily on Facebook and Twitter, access to additional social networks. In addition, "the move comes after a round of consolidation in the market for applications that allow users to manage multiple social networks; Facebook recently purchased Friendfeed, while Pownce and Kwippy are no longer operational," the paper noted. "Apple, meanwhile, is to acquire mobile advertising platform Quattro Wireless for $275 million. The computer maker recently missed out on buying similar service AdMob when it was outbid by Google."

Seesmic, which added Twitter functionality and took on Tweetdeck in 2009 through its acquisition of Twhirl, had set a New Year's resolution of 1 million status updates per day. Ping.fm will provide 200,000 of that figure, according to the Financial Times.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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