Seesmic is buying Ping.fm, a service that lets you update nearly all of your social networks (including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) with one simple post. With this acquisition, we’re now entering the next age of streamlined social networking where tools that lets you streamline your inbound feeds, and syndicate the content you share are all housed in one place. While there is still no indication of what exactly this partnership will turn into, you can bet that the pull/push concepts that both of these companies are pioneering will somehow be fused.

In the world of 3rd party apps built for improving our experience in social media, there are two trends that have been growing in 2009 and will continue to do so in 2010. 

First, is the streamlining of how we get our content. Earlier in the evolving world of social media, people were required to log into separate sites to view content created by friends, family, and people they follow. As the act of hopping from site to site became cumbersome, sites like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, my6sense, FriendFeed, etc stepped up to the plate to stream all your social connections into one easy package.

The second trend has been to the benefit of people who want to share content. Much like the act of reading your social streams, those who wish to create posts, tweets, or share media were at one point required to log into multiple networks and post content based on unique systems. Enter tools like Ping.Fm, Posterous, and Tumblr which now allow a single update from one point be syndicated out to all major social networks.

This potential reality should be watched by brands for several reasons:

• Make note of where people’s attention truly is: While a certain group of people seem to be using social network X, be mindful that the original content might be coming from somewhere else. Example, all of a person’s tweets automatically post to Facebook doesn’t mean they are an active Facebook user. 

• Be where your customers are: The above tools will encourage individuals to be active in more social networks. While Facebook and Twitter seem to be the media darlings at this point, if it doesn’t cost you extra time or money to syndicate content to other networks, then it make sense to do so. A) you reach people outside of a specific network and B) you are improving the frequency of your content while individuals jump from one network to another.  

• Sponsorships: Many social sites now sell media and sponsorship opportunities for brands who want to engage users on their site. If in the future, a large chunk of users are accessing their social data through 3rd party tools (instead of facebook.com, twitter.com, etc) then those people will not see your sponsored content. As of this moment, tools like Seesmic can’t display things like applications or banners ads and it doesn’t look like that will change in the future. In other words, be mindful of where you develop sponsorships because despite the massive traffic and usage social networks get, that doesn’t equal traffic or views of content on the home site.