Hello again Pingland! We've come back again with some new stuff that you might take kindly to. Gonna keep this short and sweet, so prepare!

We've added two new sites to our arsenal. Everyone welcome Ning and MerchantCircle to the ever-growing list of unstoppable awesomeness.

For those who plan to add Ning, you can currently only add one site connection, but we are researching the best way to provide multiple sites support. This goes along with the other services that people want multiples of too. So, just know it's coming!

Aside from the new adds, we've improved connections with Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. We've moved authentication over to OAuth for Twitter and Friendfeed.

For Facebook, we've moved the setup process over to Facebook Connect. You no longer have to add the Ping.fm Facebook app to connect your account and pages.

Awesome!

In lieu of keeping this short, we will leave you with that. We have incredible new stuff coming real soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Until next time,

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm

Some of you have been already informed of our latest feature added to our menagerie of awesome. For those who have not, here it is.

Link stats!

That's right. If you are a fan of our URL shortener, and are familiar with it's antics, you will be glad to know that you can now track incoming statistics on the URLs you generate.

We track all sorts of cool information like link visits, unique visits, referrals and referral country origination. This is all presented to you in a fancy interface that let's you see how well your posted links are tracking with your social network audiences. We think it's pretty rad!

While we gather some feedback from you folks, we will be pondering other statistics you might want to see on your links and adding to the output every so often. You should totally give us a shout and put some bugs in our ears.

This is a user-opt in feature that you can turn on here.

If you're curious for more, you can read all about how this works right over heeeeere!

We have more stuff coming out soon, so keep on the lookout for forests full of unexplainable and ridiculous magic.

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm

At around 11AM CDT, one of our database servers decided to take a leave of absence. What seemed like a routine "reboot and go" situation turned out to be much much worse than assumed.

We run daily snapshots of databases to ensure data integrity for situations like this. About 6 days ago, the backups started to crash out and not save properly.

This is bad for a few reasons: We dump backups for situations just like this. When we cant restore from last day's backup, it forces us to restore from an older one. We have to repeat that process until one takes and is restored successfully.

That being said. The last backup we had successfully post was 5 days ago (09.06.2009). Not cool at all.

While we have restored services, we are still working on restoring the last 5 days of data.

What's this mean for you?

New users within the last 5 days won't have an account anymore, any changes you've made to your services (i.e. updating passwords) will need to be reapplied, all short links posted in those 5 days will be invalid and redirect to the Ping.fm homepage and recent message lists will be behind 5 days.

Outside of the missing days, the service is back and running 100%. If you notice anything unusual with your account or posted messages, please shoot us a support e-mail (support@) and someone will be there to assist.

We apologize for these interruptions and are doing what we can to restore the missing data. You know us, we love to work! Check our Twitter feed for updates on things to come with this as well as the new stuff we are about to introduce into the pingosphere.

Cheers!

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm
@pingfm

We know it's been ages since our last fancy blog update. To be honest, we've been seriously busy beyond blogging. We've been hard at work increasing the ping power as well as adding some handy dandy new features.

So, first things first, let's talk about what we have new for you.

If you haven't noticed already, we've put some cool little banners up on the dashboard about a "Ping.fm Toolbar." For those of you wondering, yes it's the latest addition to our methods of posting. We've been working with Conduit, using their very cool toolbar creation platform to create a Ping.fm browser toolbar. Yes, now everyone that has been salivating over such feature can finally end the hunger pangs.

This toolbar is pretty slick. It's supported on Firefox, IE and Safari browsers. And, any time we feel like adding new stuff to it, the toolbar will automatically update without you having to download a new version. We think it's awesome!

For those of you already using other Conduit toolbars (like the CrunchBar), you can easily add the Ping.fm straight to the existing toolbar without downloading a new one.

If THAT interests you, head on over to the Conduit Marketplace and check check check that out. Search for Ping.fm in the Conduit Marketplace to see the dealies we've created.

We hope you enjoy what we've done with Conduit to further improve the giant we call Ping.fm. As always, if you have any questions or problems with the new toolbar, just drop us a line and let us know about it. Be sure to check the "Ping.fm Browser Toolbar" product too, so we know you're talking about it.

But wait! There's more! (R.I.P. Billy Mays):

We've added two new sites to the Ping.fm consortium!

Everyone welcome Yahoo Profiles (formerly Yahoo 360) and Tagged.

These are two services that we've had an immense amount of request for, and now it's done! So enjoy!

We promise not to wait so long for updates like this next time.

Enjoy the new,

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm

We've officially launched support for Facebook Pages. You can now add your Facebook fan pages as you would any other service we support. What does this mean to you? Well, if you're a business, artist, celebrity, public figure or any other entity that has a fan page for your people to come hang out with you on Facebook, then now you can not only update your Facebook profile status, but your messages will be syndicated to your fan page as well.

If you're still a bit lost, head on over to our fan page to see what they're all about.

In addition to this slick update, we've added some new message posting options to more personalize your posts. We're talking about tagging and mooding.

What, you say?!

Tons of users have asked for the ability to tag posts with tags they specify to help them catalog the posts on the various services they are using. We've done work, and now you can reap the benefits!

Tagging is now a part of your everyday pinging experience. Posting photos, links, blogs; if you post it, you can tag it. Click here to learn all there is to know about tagging your posts.

As well as tagging, be sure to check out how to also include mood tags in with posts. Now you can tell everyone how you feel with as little effort as possible (or something).

Last but not least, we bring you to a nice little gem we just added as of last night. With the vast improvements to the user dashboard we are rolling out, we decided to go ahead and sneak one of the updates into production so you can get busy with it.

We've added a new icon above the post form that resembles a music note. If you were to click this cute little button, you will be presented with a screen that allows you to attach songs to your messages you post. Cool huh?

Let us introduce you to Grooveshark. Grooveshark is this awesome web service that allows anyone and everyone to search for music and play it straight from their website. Their library is intense too. We've had quite a hard time not finding songs we want to hear. And the best part about their service is that it's FREE.

Yes, absolutely free. You don't even have to sign up to search and listen (though you probably should).

This is just a tip of the iceberg on the up and coming user dashboard improvements. So, you will be seeing more very soon.

Don't forget to tell your friends!

Be safe, and keep up the ping.

Adam & Sean
Ping.fm