Tag Archives: Pownce

Comparing Pownce to Twitter

December 20, 2007 – 9:04 pm

Sparked by the recent TechCrunch post about the downward spiral of Pownce, (which itself was inspired by this Uncov piece), I thought I’d throw in my two cents on the issue.

I’ll start right off by saying that I don’t necessarily think a comparison to Twitter is completely valid, but then again, that’s probably part of Pownce’s problem. I don’t use Twitter, but it’s widely regarded as being an excellent tool for what it does, and a large piece of that value is its strict adherence to a model of simplicity.

If their intention was to compete with Twitter (which it seems to have been), they had a hard task ahead of them. They could either do the same thing (very limited functionality, done well) and just do it better (which they probably figured they couldn’t win at, and were probably correct) or go the route of adding more features on top and hoping to woo people over that way.

The problem with the latter approach is that they turned it into essentially a blogging tool with social networking features. I’m sure someone probably thought this was genius, but they missed the fact that people who want to blog already have excellent tools available to them, and most people currently have their fill of social networking on FaceBook.

In looking at Pownce (before I started using it), I used to think that it might be a good fit for someone who essentially wants to “blog” (posts + comments) but maybe wants an ultra-simple entry point. That part totally falls down, however, when it comes to following conversations, which is a key feature of blogs in my opinion.

Pownce does this very poorly: there is no good way to keep up with comment threads that you’ve either participated in or are interested in. I’ve talked plenty about how much I don’t like this aspect of Pownce before, both here and on Pownce itself, so no need to belabor that point.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Pownce - first impressions

November 21, 2007 – 11:22 pm

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.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)