Max Engel - the 8BitKid » Giving Pownce Another Glance

So I have been a Twitter fiend for over a year now (much to the chagrin of my friends). The ease of Twitter’s SMS short-code system is definitely the main reason I have been able to integrate Twitter into my life so easily. I have also been a user of Pownce, but certainly not to the extent that I find myself giving my thumbs an exercise communicating the minutia of my life via my mobile microblogging.

I received a Pownce friend request last night, and that lead me to spend some time revisiting the service. I was pleasantly surprised by some nifty features that Pownce has rolled out and refined. They offer some really slick friend discovery tools, such as the option to import from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other social sites. Pownce also has a pretty pretty desktop app built on Adobe Air. I’d love to see support for Google’s Social Graph API’s to check for connections against my blogroll, but hopefully that is coming.

There is one capability in Pownce that really catches my eye: event creation. As a fan of flash-mobs and general ad-hoc tom-foolery, I love the ability to easily create an event listing and zap it out to my friends. I often use Twitter as a social spam tool to let my friends know about events, but would love a more coherent yet light-weight event creation and communication experience. For example, it is fantastic the Pownce supports iCal subscriptions to get your events into a calendaring application.

I think that Pownce and Twitter can coexist, with Twitter being a platform of self-expression and Pownce offering a toolkit for content sharing. If you want to find me, check out: http://pownce.com/8bitkid/

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One Response

Isaac Z. Schlueer

But can’t Twitter do that anyway?

With the “Sandy” app, you can tweet stuff like “d s r call joe tomorrow at 10″. It became The Killer GTD App in my life as soon as I started using it. You can do other stuff, too, like share calendars and whatnot. Check it out: http://twitter.com/s and http://iwantsandy.com

I think the key difference with Twitter is that it’s lots of “social”, very little “network”. It’s never spam, because everyone determines what they receive. Before you follow someone, you see a history of the latest updates they’ve posted. And if you ever get annoyed, just turn off the stream (or switch it to web only, or whatever.)

For content sharing, I follow @rands, @codinghorror, @newsycombinator, @laughingsquid, and @linklog primarily because they post links that I like reading. It’s a super-personalized Digg. Instead of voting, you retweet the link. Occasionally, something won’t look interesting, but if I see a few other people post it, I’ll be intrigued.

These kinds of social behaviors are emergent properties from a very simple feature set. While Pownce may be useful, I think it will always fall short of Twitter’s potential, largely because it doesn’t have the same spartan feature set. Granted, Twitter falls short of Twitter’s potential, but at least they’re working on it.

So, I guess I’m an even bigger Twitter fiend… ;)