Why Pingfm removed Shoutitout support

Around a year ago when Seesmic bough Pingfm, the site for sending messages to several social networks, it removed several services from its list, the most major one was Shoutitout. We since have been wondering why, well we now know.

It turns out there was several reasons, one was that Pingfm was being used for allot of Shoutitout spam, both companies were looking for a fix when the acquition happened, Seesmic, the acquiring party saw an opportunity to take advantage of and did, removing Shoutitout support.

This moved on to the second reason, they wanted to boost the popularity of Seesmic being used to Shout, which is why they focus manly on Android when it comes to Shoutitout, that seems to be Shoutitout’s biggest phone market. Thus since Pingfm was the, at the time, the biggest Shoutitout 3rd party client they removed the competition.

One thing did backfire, Android is now the newest popular 3rd party application.

Pingfm slowly declining, Hellotxt just the opposite

Pingfm was growing rapidly and becoming something of an popular site. It basically offers a way for its users to post to almost every social network on the internet, or it did. Pingfm was purchased by popular client Seesmic. Seemsic has since, pretty much just left Pingfm alone. Shortly after it was acquired Pingfm cut most of the services it allows posting to, for example Shoutitout. It was the most popular 3rd party service on Shoutitout and it was Pingfm’s 3rd most popular network to post to (behind Facebook and Twitter). The reason Pingfm cut support for Shoutitout? Seesmic Android was about to launch it and they wanted to cut down on the competition and have people looking for another client to use. This wouldn’t be the first time Seesmic has done this. It did a similar thing with Twhirl which was extremely popular across all the social networks it supported. Pingfm’s visits have been declining rapidly, the site I think will replace it? Hellotxt. Hellotxt has gotten popular on Shoutitout, the site Pingfm got popular on before it took off. It has also launched some new features like a mobile site, its much more mobile than Pingfm ever was. Hellotxt is keeping a strait line of traffic at the moment but Pingfm has dropped down to its size and is still dropping as the chart below shows.

Pingfm you just shot yourself in the foot

Pingfm the multi network posting site has just shot themselves in the foot. There biggest competitor is without a doubt HelloTxt. Pingfm has just cut almost all the network they hosted and Hellotxt now has more than them. HelloTxt creates one stream of all your networks but Pingfm had that one thing, amount of networks, in till now. This might make HelloTxt come rubbling up and passed Pingfm. pingfm was bough a few months ago by Seesmic and has since then been becoming more and more like Seesmic, focusing on Twitter. They have had posting delays the last few days and seem to be slower to fix issues no, they’ve also been subject to a DNS attack since the acquisition. Pingfm seems to have a target painted on there site and if HelloTxt doesn’t take them down some new startup will.