Kevin Rose’s Pownce has made quite an impression on the blogosphere and surprisingly (sarcasm), two Pownce related articles made it to the frontpage of Digg yesterday. But does it bring anything new to the table? In other words, how does it separate itself from Twitter, a much more popular service?
First of all, Pownce has everything Twitter does. You can add friends and expand your social network. Having done that, you can begin spreading the love via short messages. Pownce even has a client app built on the Adobe’s AIR framework (formerly Apollo), which might I add, is well made both aesthetically and functionally.
A successful idea expanded
Instead of simply posting short 140 character messages, you can now post links, events and even upload files and music. Even still, the best innovation about Pownce is that you don’t have to send your updates/links/files to everybody (like on Twitter). You can select specific people and even groups to distribute your messages to.
The above features alone make it a viable competitor to Twitter. Other companies have come and gone (think Dukudu which joined TechCrunch Deadpool), but none have really innovated on Twitter’s idea, they simply copied it. Pownce though, manages to keep it simple, yet add quite a bit of functionality to make their product stand out.
Negatives
Unfortunately, my invite to Pownce was flagged by Gmail as ‘spam’. Apparently pownce@pownce.com has a negative connotation about it. Or perhaps Gmail, like a 13 year old boy, couldn’t keep it in their pants. Whatever.
Another negative is that default notification settings have everything turned on, from friend requests (manageable) to new message notifications (totally unacceptable). I’ve only added a couple of friends and in a short amount of time, received a ton of emails notifying me of updates. This explains the spam flag on their email. Thankfully, these settings are super easy to adjust.
What I’d like to see in the future
The client application for Pownce needs improvement. While it’s off to a great start, it doesn’t come close to Twitterrific’s simplicity and unobtrusive existence. I don’t like small apps like this to be in the Dock, they just take up space. I’m not sure the AIR framework can support this though, so I don’t know how Pownce can make this happen.
Monetization
Unlike Twitter, Pownce has a clear plan to make money: ads. They’re pretty unintrusive and blend right in with the rest of the website (design-wise).
If you’d like to try it out, reply here as I have some invites.
Jessie
over 2 years ago
Oohh, may I have an invite please? P's & q's!