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A few thoughts on Pownce

Fred Oliveira on July 8, 2007 Comments (6)

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned a specific web-application on this blog, but I wrote a few notes on Pownce to send in as feedback and figured it might be interesting to post them as well.

If you don’t know what Pownce is, lets call it a spruced up Twitter (I know Kevin, Daniel, Shawn and Leah must be getting tired of the comparison, but it does sort of fit) that allows you to send messages, files, events and links. And it looks pretty good design-wise (no surprises there, Daniel keeps doing great work).

Pownce

What it should do better

Grouping: I want (and I assume many others do too) to be able to send these content bits (the notes, events, links and files) to certain groups of people – in short, I want to be able to categorize, tag or group my friends so I can address them as a group. Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, even though many people asked for it, and Pownce doesn’t either, unfortunately. [Duane in the comments tells me this does exist (apparently it's called sets), which doesn't say a lot for me for not finding it, or Pownce for not being obvious about it's killer feature. I'm extremely glad this does exist!]

It doesn’t make sense for my friends in the US to get the same messages I send my friends in Portugal. This is particularly true for events, because those carry local context.

Findability: I had a really bad time with the friend-finding experience. Searching for friends one by one is not going to work if they number in the hundreds, and browsing friends of friends – which is usually the best solution – doesn’t feel right on Pownce either because they show names as “Firstname L.” instead of the full name or the nickname.

That name display issue and the fact that they show a limited number of people per page (unlike Twitter, that bombs you with icons for each person) makes you want to give up adding new people (I know I did). Fixing that means growth, people – come on!

All things considered,

Pownce is a very neat application. I’m still not sure how many people will be coming in from other services (like Jaiku or Twitter), but if they did the grouping I suggest above thing I’d be moving in a snap – and I’m sure others would as well.

Well, that being said, if you do try out Pownce, feel free to add me up – it’ll be interesting to converse with this blog’s audience (which is now way over the 12.000 people mark). See you there and if you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment here.

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Comments on this post

Duane Brown

Hey Fred

You can actually group together your contacts but in Pownce it’s called sets. I was able to start doing this once I got to four contacts. I’ve one for work vs friends. Otherwise nice article.

maique

i use twitter’s mobile features to send private SMSs to a couple of friend’s, straight from my computer. i can’t do that from jaiku or pownce (no mobile support is a big mistake, in my opinion)-

jaiku is perfect for those who want to keep a life stream, and follow someone else’s stream while at it.
it also allows some sort of commenting feature for those with tumblr blogs, that lacks that feature. it’s a strange workaround but you can get it to work if you feed jaiku with your tublr url..

while pownce is well designed (i’ll give them that) it fails miserably on some other stuff. i can send files bigger than 10mb in a thousand different ways (including, gasp, email) and link-sending seems just plain stupid to me.

i’m on pownce (i’m an beta-slut) but don’t use it and i keep using twitter more and more. same goes for jaiku. the more i use jaiku, the better i feel with it…

Will

Pownce solves grouping, that’s actually my favorite feature. I have my web friends, social friends, and photographer friends all split up and I can send to one group or everyone. It’s functional and does the trick for my needs.

I’ve enjoyed the overall Pownce experience so far, but I’ve struggled with the pownce.air application on my MacBook Pro and I really don’t like having to go to the website because the desktop app doesn’t like me.

I seem to have bugs with the AIR application that others don’t and finding information on issues or getting any sort of feedback from bug reports seems non-existent. I don’t even think there was a changlog with the last update I downloaded.

Most of my more tech/web friends have slipped back to twitter, but of the new people I know jumping into this sort of pointless social networking standard are taking a cling to Pownce. I tried to justify that they were different but they share the same basic function and people seem to make their choice for one or the other.

I agree w/ maique that no mobile updates are a huge blow to the system. I never use my phone for updates on twitter so I didn’t really notice it, but my friends point it out all the time.

Time will tell though…

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Nicole Simon

Yeah, sets are hard to find, but fine. A point as it seems only >monolingual people “get”. One pownce application equals two twitter accounts. I actually find this the killer feature and not so much the sending of links.

There are several things missing, but from this start, I think they can go very very far. One request I have is reading sets as well, not only sending to sets; and of course the process of adding friends by recognizing their first name is stupid as well.

But again, it seems to me that they CAN go from there and that feels great. The only reason to really go on with twitter at the moment is the mobile page (I use twitter exclusivly as data in my browser, and on the mobile with the reduced pages).

(Spam bots suck at math – they don’t suck at math, they just hit you with all numbers until they crackec your code and then spam you again, but it is a start)

Something to say?