What is Pond?

Generally speaking...

What Pond is and what it does

Pond is a social media aggregator and publisher that allows you to follow your friends, collect information about them and share your own content in some of the most popular online social content services available.

In Pond you decide what content you want to see and your friends don't even have to use Pond. As long as you can add them as contacts in any of the services Pond supports or they provide a feed (eg., a blog RSS feed), you can add them to Pond and follow their stuff. ↑top

Services

What services does Pond support?

Currently, Pond supports Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Picasa, Facebook, SAPO Vídeos, SAPO Fotos and SAPO Blogs, and you can also subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed you want.

Will it support more services?

Yes it will. Pond is a server-side system, so we can develop new features for it and you can start using them right away. Integrating new services is one of our main developments.

Is Pond multi-account?

Yes, Pond is truly multi-account: you can add any number of accounts from all of the supported services. ↑top

Friends

Do friends have to be people?

Not really. In Pond, friends are information providers. They can be people you know and follow in any or all of the services we support, but they can also be other sources of information such as newspapers, companies, groups and organisations.

Are my friends imported when I add an account?

Yes. Pond adds people as friends when they are your friends in any of the services you add. If you don't see a friend in Pond that you know you have in Flickr, Facebook or any other service it just means that person hasn't published anything in a while. They will be added to Pond as soon as they post.

I follow my friend Susan in Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, I added her and now have three Susans in Pond, can I merge them?

Yes you can. And that's the whole point. After you merge all your friend's online indentities into one you can very easily follow Susan's updates from all the services she uses in one integrated timeline. ↑ top

Publishing

Does Pond publish content?

Yes, all sorts of content. In Pond, you select the type of content you want to publish, you fill in the details and add the files and then you tell Pond where you want it published.

Because Pond is directly connected to the services it supports, it knows what each service capabilities are and will only suggest you post your content to a service that supports it.

Does that mean I can cross publish?

Sure you can. Because Pond knows which service supports what and because you can have multiple accounts from multiple services, Pond will let you post your content to one, many or all of the accounts which support that specific type of content.

You can publish the same photo on Flickr and Facebook, you can send a status update to two Twitter accounts and Facebook, post a video on YouTube and Flickr.

I published a video through Pond but I can't see it on YouTube, why?

Pond uploads your content as fast as possible but it's up to each service to actually publish it. For quick text, like Twitter, it's immediate; for more complex stuff, like videos, it can take a while, since YouTube needs to convert your file to their specifications.

Other services may have other types of processing done to uploaded content, so speed of publishing will vary according to that. If any of your uploaded content gets rejected by the service, Pond will let you know. ↑ top

Pond Applications

Is Pond a [insert service here] client?

Pond isn't a client for any specific service, but because it's so flexible you can actually use it as such.

If, for example, you want to use Pond as a Twitter client, just filter your main timeline for Twitter only content and use the short text publisher to tweet. It's that easy. If you want to find mentions, just filter the timeline to show only Twitter and then choose "events for me". Easy.

You can do this for any of the supported services and you can event combine them - go ahead, make Pond a Twitter-Flickr-Facebook client. It's dead easy.

Can I run Pond on my favorite device, is it multi-platform?

It sure is. Because Pond is a server system it's easy to develop clients for many platforms. And when you turn your specific client on and log in to your Pond account, you know that all your stuff is there.

There's no syncing because everything is in the server. If you look at your Pond timeline from your iPhone, your desktop computer or the web, you'll see the same events from the same friends.

Currently, Pond provides the following clients:

• Web clients (three variations: for your desktop browser, for webkit based mobile phone browsers and for basic mobile browsers)
• Desktop clients (for Windows, Mac OS and Linux)
• Mobile clients (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android and Nokia WRT)

Some clients have a full-feature set, others are limited, depending on the capabilities of their platform, but if there is something you can't do on one of the simpler clients, you can always fall back to the web client, which will allow you to fully configure your Pond to be used on the other clients.

My mobile phone has no advanced features, can I still use Pond?

You most certainly can, as long as your phone supports SMS (most do). If you can also send MMS, even better.

Just go to the web client and associate your phone number with Pond and choose which services you want to receive your mobile posts and which you want to receive text updates from.

Now you just have to text or MMS Pond and it will publish your text, photos or videos to the services you have chosen and you will also receive personal messages via SMS. ↑ top