Having a posting method which won't allow the user to select where the post will be published can lead to complications, as we soon proved.

We couldn't let this stay like this and so we built a quick hack by which you can select which accounts will get published to.

If you go to your account configuration in your Pond account, you will notice that each account has a name, which you can even change by pressing the rename button on the right-hand side of the list of accounts. This name is there to facilitate finding out, when you look at a list of events, which account did the event come from, but it will now also be useful in selecting which account will we publish to.

Let's imagine, as an example, that your Publish by e-mail address is blue25orange@pondapp.com, and that you have three accounts, a personal Twitter account named MyTwitter, a personal Facebook account named MyFacebook and work Twitter account named WorkTwitter.

If you wish to publish to your personal Twitter account, you would use the name portion of your e-mail (blue25orange in this example) plus (+) the name of the account (MyTwitter) resulting in blue25orange+MyTwitter@pondapp.com. For the other accounts, the e-mails would be blue25orange+MyFacebook@pondapp.com and blue25orange+WorkTwitter@pondapp.com .

You can also get creative and "add" more than one account, such as blue25orange+MyTwitter+MyFacebook@pondapp.com.

There are some restrictions to this: only alphanumerical characters are supported in the account name part of the e-mail, as well as underscore. No accented characters, please, convert them to the unaccented versions before using. Thus, an account named Zé's Account (personal) added to the above example, would become blue25orange+ZesAccountpersonal@pondapp.com. An account named João_has_an_über_twitter will become blue25orange+Joao_has_an_uber_twitter@pondapp.com.

Yes, it's a bit geeky, but I'm sure you'll appreciate the extra flexibility.

Enjoy.

So, you wish to post to your networks using good, old-fashioned, e-mail?

Maybe you want to automate postings (please don't spam) or ... maybe, just maybe, you wish to cross-post from Google+  to your other networks and don't know how to: Pond is here to help.

All you have to do is add an email to one of your circles, and whenever you post to that circle, we'll re-direct your post to your other networks.

Before we show you how, let us list the warnings (please read them):

1. This was a 24-hour hackathon. This means that our testing might not have been as thorough as we like, and there might be bugs.
2. We will (for now) blindly post to all accounts with support for status updates, namely all Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. If you have more than one of these, all will get the post. Those of you who have a "work" Twitter or Facebook account, please take heed.
3. For now, we only post a short status update. We add a link to the original post if the mail comes from Google+. We plan to add a lot of functionality, but for now this it.

This was planned yesterday around lunch time, written during the afternoon, tested this morning and launched now, so pay close attention to that BETA tag, please.

Now that we have got that out of the way, how do I go about setting it up?

Simple, go to accounts and read the "Publish by e-mail" section, which will tell you your very own, unique, publishing email. Anything sent to this e-mail is published on your networks, though currently only on those that support status updates.

To cross-post from Google+, just add this address to one of your circles. Anything posted to that circle will appear on Pond. Keep in mind that Google+ sometimes takes hours to send the email out, so an ocasional delay is inevitable.

Keep this email address to yourself. We trust any e-mail sent to this address as being yours, and will publish anything on it as being your own, so please don't tell other people about it. If you feel your email has been compromised, you can go to your account page and reset your e-mail address to a new one. We will promptly drop the old one from our list.

Hope this is useful, we definitely had fun doing it.