Why Pownce Sucks.
Pownce is the latest in the micro-blogging trend that started with and still largely surrounds Twitter. It is an attempt to expand on the functions, throwing file-sharing and specific visual aspects into the mix. You can directly embed video and photos, post links, event notices, and group your friends to send messages to select people. It also doesn’t place a limit on the length of messages. It sounds like a great idea on paper, and I can understand why it was made, but there are a few things that prevent it from replacing Twitter in my mind.
The main issue for me is simplicity. The real appeal to Twitter is the simplicity of it. 140 character bursts of thought, a URL if you can fit it in, and nothing else. They go out to the world, or just to your friends, but either way it’s visible to everyone in either group. The idea of selecting who receives what, and throwing files into the mix just makes it a glorified Facebook Wall or “email page,” and the file size limit (10MB free, 100MB for $20/yr) gimps what could have been a nice feature. Embedding photos and videos, also a nice feature, really only muddies things further. The idea of these micro-blogs always seemed to be simplicity, and if you made it any more complicated, they became something that already existed- email, or message boards. By trying to expand on the functionality, it really just takes away from the clean, simple idea that Twitter introduced. It also limits other features like receiving messages on your phone. One of the coolest parts of Twitter for me is getting all of your friends’ updates on your phone, always being in touch with what people are doing. Pownce takes a novel idea and turns it into something that we already have.
Another major fault with Pownce up until recently was the lack of a public API, and the only other method for making posts was with a desktop app using the clunky, crash-prone Adobe AIR. However, this mark against Pownce was rectified on Oct. 30 when the public API was released. Naturally, nothing has really come out of it yet, but some good apps and mashups could make Pownce a lot more useful. Still, in this day and age, a service like Pownce should have had a public API from day one, and I cannot fathom why they didn’t do it and went with a crashing beta platform like AIR instead.
All in all, I’m not dismissing Pownce outright because it could become something I use on a regular basis, but I’m certainly not using it. The clusterfuck of “features” make it too busy (and this is from a guy who uses Netvibes, the busiest-looking start page ever), the limited file size prevents anything decent being shared, and late-start API prevents it from being useful. Give me clean, simple Twitter any day.
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2 Responses to “Why Pownce Sucks.”
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I wholeheartedly agree. Pownce and Jaiku and all the others seemingly have potential to be useful for . . . something? I’m not sure. Meanwhile, Twitter IS useful and simple and, therefore, beautiful.
Word. Twitter is, and remains, the bomb-diggity.