Ping.fm Secures Angel Funding From Joi Ito And Reid Hoffman

Ping.fm is a very simple, useful service that enables you to send a message to 30+ social networks at once, using either standard e-mail, your mobile phone or popular IM services. Its simplicity apparently attracted two high-profile angel investors, according to a company blog post. The new backers are Reid Hoffman (who just became CEO of LinkedIn again) and Joi Ito.

We first took note of Ping.fm in late March this year, when the service was still in private beta, and we warned it could well become merely ‘a feature of a feature’. Nonetheless, the site seems to be holding its own and has attracted enough users to start having problems scaling the service.

Ping.fm apparently had its share of problems and slow response times the past few weeks, and the new capital should help them obtain more stability. From the post:

This is mainly because of not having the resources to maintain the volume of users and overall traffic we are seeing. This investment will allow us to scale our hardware to improve the reliability of our service as well as continue to increase the awesome that is Ping.fm instead of babysitting smoking servers all day.

It’s unclear how much both men have invested in the pinging service. It’s also unclear if there will ever be mainstream adoption of Ping.fm, as it seems a bit reserved to power socnet users / early adopters.

(Source: ReadWriteWeb)