So I finally hit the tipping point. I have too many networks to keep up with. Now I don’t sign up and use a service just because it is new. I will check it out and see what it has to offer, but I definitely need to find value in the service if I am going to use it regularly. With that said I have hit the limit of the amount of sites and posts I can physically update. Even before this point, going to all the services I had made it hard to keep up with the witty repartee. At some point the well runs dry.

The latest service I have found is Yammer. The idea of being able to communicate with co-workers on a Twitter-like network is fascinating and needed. It is a great way to build your presence and share your ideas in the place it can have the most impact – your job! It is great way to find out what is going on within your organization for things like as projects, pitches, events, etc. I work for Sapient, we are an organization of 6,500+ people with offices all over the world (LA, Boston, Miami, London, Germany, Sweden….you get the point). We also have a couple thousand people in India (Bangalore, Dehli, and Gurgaon). The amount of projects, the use of technologies and the types of innovations happening in all these places is hard to keep up with. Yammer has allowed me to keep up with all this while building relationships and getting human context outside of an email.

I find Yammer useful, but I also find Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Flickr, and Delicious also very useful for different reasons. So adding Yammer to that list just pushed me over the edge. There is no way I can keep up with all those services and still find time in the day to eat, sleep and more importantly – work! Something had to be done. So what did I do? I started looking at other services that might help………It isn’t what you think though, let me explain.

I think we have come to a point where the marketplace is saturated with these sites and services. They are popping up all over and most of them with very similar features as their predecessors. Innovation is coming from the mashups of these services,  creating new services that allow you to access multiple sites from one interface. So I was doing some research, and found ping.fm. ping.fm allows me to access all the services I use and through an interface I already use. I can update Twitter, Plaxo and Yammer all thru AIM seperately or all at once. You can setup tags to send updates to specific services. For instance, if I preface any message in AIM with #tweet, it will send the message to my Twitter and Yammer accounts. If I preface any AIM message with #status it will update my LinkedIn and Facebook status. ping.fm has allowed me to consolidate all my communications and without an additional desktop application or website.

Whats your opinion? Do you use a lot of different social media sites? How do you ink them together? What are the best applications out there like ping.fm?