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.