The problem, of course, is that not everyone is on the same social network. And you might not want to be on any of the social networks that I’m on. Or you might not trust any of those companies. Enter ping.fm.

ping.fm serves as a central point for me to blast out my navel-gazing, mind-numbingly boring status updates to a variety of services (all of the ones mentioned above and more like Plurk, MySpace, Pownce, LinkedIn, Tumblr). This means when I make a status update at ping.fm, it gets fanned out to all the sites I’ve ping-enabled (of course I have to give them credentials for each site).

All of this is great but not totally innovative, it’s just another layer of madness above the existing, silo’ed madness. And it doesn’t solve the fragmented two-way conversation problem (replies on Twitter stay on Twitter, etc). But what caught my eye this evening was the ability to fan my ping.fm updates to custom URLs. This means I can set up a PHP page on my own website and ping.fm will send the status updates to that page also. This opens up some interesting possibilities.

So I did just that. I now have a microblog/status feed on this site if anyone cares when I brushed my teeth or if I’m late for a train. Be the first to know!

How it works: I use ping.fm to post my status and it is fanned out automatically to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, identi.ca and codedread’s custom PHP. That PHP takes the status and adds it to a static Atom file on my site.

So now that I’ve got a microblog feed that’s disentangled from any one particular social network, I’ll probably add some code to my site to display the latest status from my microblog feed somewhere.

Oh and if you don’t like the funky character in the URL then you can also use this one. They both point to the same location.

One request to ping.fm: Please support OpenID!