I recently signed up for Pownce, partly to be able to comment on friends’ posts there, and partly for research on a new plugin I’m thinking about doing.
I hadn’t signed up before, because I couldn’t really think of anything that I’d want to use it for that I wouldn’t rather just do on my own blog. I still can’t think of much in that regard, other than perhaps private posts that are only available to friends. You could still do this on WordPress, but it may not be as easy for the friends you want to share with.
To be honest, I think it says a lot about the nature of the platform that my primary reason for joining was to work around a restriction imposed by the system’s closed nature (specifically, needing to be a Pownce user to comment on friends’ posts, even public ones).
The other drawback I’ve found (similar to Facebook, although a bit worse in Pownce’s case) also centers around their “walled garden” approach to the information.
They do have some RSS support and quite a bit of e-mail notification options, but for some things that I consider pretty important (like seeing when someone has replied on a thread that you’ve commented on) there’s no other way that I can find than to go to their actual site and check it periodically. (PS - If you know of a workaround for this, please let me know)
They did recently publish an API which has some pretty limited functionality, but it would go a long way towards making me more of a fan of their service if the scope of the API would be expanded to provide access to all of “my” content (or content related to “mine”) in the system. I guess that’s the key concept here: who really owns the data? In closed systems like Facebook and Pownce, it’s clearly them, even though you might like to think of the information as “yours”.
On the bright side, this is probably a good starter system for people who would really like something like a blog but even signing up at wordpress.com is a bit too techie for them. Combined with the social networking aspects, I can see the attraction for a lot of people.
Bottom line: I’ll keep my account for a while in hopes that the areas I was down on will improve, but I don’t plan to publish much original content there; I’ll keep that as “my own” and maintain a heck of a lot more flexibility with it by publishing here on my blog.
7 Comments
i’m starting to see the value in having a walled garden. even if the gate is unlocked, having a fence is nice.
I’m not quite sure what you mean there.
The detriments of a “walled garden” approach that I’m talking about affect you as an “owner” (or should-be owner) of your data, in addition to others who may want to use it.
For example, you may find the restriction of only publishing to and allowing comments from selected members beneficial (I’m just guessing that’s where you were going with that), but you could do that in a non-”walled garden” system as well.
The walled garden aspect comes in when you (as the account owner) are forced to access your data in the system through a particularly limited interface that they provide, and are not free to access it completely in other ways.
Not sure what nathan was getting at but *I* value my “walled garden”’s approach (pownce and facebook) because they aren’t compensating by releasing relatively unnecessary features to compensate for any shortcomings. Both accomplish their purpose/mission better then any other and I could not create a better system even if that system accomplished everything I wanted in an “open” platform.
Also, simplicity is so undervalued these days with the notion that everything needs to be completely “open”.
After thinking about it, maybe nathan was trying to get the fact that the service knows how the user should be interacting with the system to improve the experience, which is nice for me. For example, I wouldn’t be able to see *everything* going on with my friends at facebook, no matter how many feeds are given, it’s only through the stream of navigation and browsing do I find the best and most interesting things. It also creates a different attitude and a better opportunity to participate, since RSS can be so cold, linear and self-centric.
well, even though myyour metaphor was confusing, my message got through!
Being open and being easy to use are not opposing standpoints.
The fact that they prevent you from fully accessing some data has nothing to do with ease of use or simplicity. They can make a completely simple (for users) system, just like they’ve got now, built on top of a more open platform, accessible via an API or whatever.
Who mentioned ease of use?
Let me re-phrase:
Simplicity is undervalued in comparison to features/openness.
First, I’d have to say that it depends on who you ask. I think most people in the software industry (aside from the old established software giants) are pretty well familiar with the value of simplicity. It’s been talked about quite a lot recently, especially in regards to Rails and Web 2.0, etc., and I think a lot of people these days do recognize and value it.
But simplicity is also a loaded term in the context of this discussion, because it isn’t antithetical to openness in any way. I’m not talking about adding more features, I’m talking about simply enabling the account owner / user to really use the features that are already there in a more open manner.
*Sometimes*, (but not always) that requires a few extra features, but often the application (if it’s well written) already has a well structured API to do everything that’s needed, it just isn’t publicly exposed. Either way, (whether there’s extra effort involved or not) it’s a tradeoff that I think is worthwhile if a company wants to recognize the user’s right to their own data.
Like I said above, you can keep the application just as simple as it is now (from the user’s perspective, and the developer’s as well, for the most part) but still provide the kind of openness that Pownce and Facebook currently lack.
Twitter is a better example of a system that goes more in the direction I’m talking about. It’s got a much better API than the others we’re talking about, while retaining “simplicity” as a goal. There are many other examples as well. Most of the 37signals stuff has pretty open APIs, and you could argue that they’re some of the leading advocates currently for simplicity in software.