Callum built Composer last year as a personal replacement for ping.fm because he missed the ability to post to WordPress, Twitter and Facebook from a single place. We both used to use ping.fm for that, and when it was taken over by Seesmic, they dropped WordPress support (and heaps of other services).
After talking about Composer for a while, Callum built it and we both started using it. A couple of other people started using it and he added Indentica support for one of those users as it was a must have network.
We’ve had a few chats about what to do with it – whether we should keep it as a service that we use as it solves a problem for us, or open it out to the public and let anyone use it.
We decided on the latter! Today, I’m starting to get involved in the project and we think that the first step is to get a few more users on board to use the service and get their feedback. Since doing some research, it’s become clear that lots of users really miss ping.fm, so there’s definitely a group of people out there who might not have found an alternative service yet, and might find this useful.
Hopefully we’ll get a few more users on board who can provide some feedback on features/networks they’d like to have. If there’s a must-have network that’s not currently supported, please get in touch – we may be able to add it quite easily and if so, hopefully quickly.
On reading about why ping.fm closed and why hellotxt closed, it may mean that at some point we will need to charge for the service to cover operating costs, however, at this point we have no plans to do so, and accounts created while the project is being developed will be free forever.
Want to help create an awesome ping.fm replacement? Sign up and join in!
Some to consider adding:
Myspace
Friendfeed
Blogger
Bebo
Multiply
Yammer
Typepad
LiveJournal
Tagged
Orkut
Sgrouples
Xanga
Badoo
Friendster
Hi5
Posterous
Hictu
Plerb
Delicious
Tuenti
Technorati
Heck, go international and add:
Netlog
Migente
Studivz
Skyrock
Sonico
Weibo and all the other asian ones out there
There is so much potential 🙂 You have my support for standing up and taking back “easy” from the social chaos 🙂
Wow – thanks for the suggestions. A good chunk of those are already on our poll, and I’ve added the others that weren’t.
Feel free to vote for your most important ones in the sidebar.
You’re very welcome. Another international one would be mixi.jp as well as it’s Japan’s biggest network so it should have a lot of users who would consider your service I’m sure.
i don’t miss my ping.fm account for more!!!!!
thank you, thank you, thank you very much, guys
P.S: if you need some help, i’m very bad with the code; but my spanish, french and catalan are much better than my english, so i can do some translation work if is needed 😉
Ha ha – thanks!
Multiple languages is maybe a stretch at the moment, but would love some help spreading the word about our service.
sure 🙂