Pownce - Kevin Rose’s IM Startup
Pownce is an Adobe AIR (ex. Adobe Apollo) application from the workshop of Digg’s creator Kevin Rose which lets you group up with friends and send messages, files, links and events to them.
Hey, this is familiar. I know, it’s called instant messaging!
Unfortunately, since Pownce is currently invite-only beta, I can’t test it out to give a proper review, but from what I can gather on the official site, it does not offer anything significantly different from most IM clients today.
There is one great feature, and I’ve been banging my head against the wall (well, not very hard) about it for a long time now, wondering why IM clients don’t make it simpler: instead of being boxed into 1:1 communication (IM) or X:X (chat) or 1:X (Twitter), Pownce offers all of it in one package. Want to send a picture to your family, but not all your friends? Easy: select recepients and send away. Try to do the same thing in any IM client and you’ll see that it usually doesn’t work and/or takes quite a few steps.
As far as other features go, you get themes (big plus in my book, but not a necessary feature by any means), and if you upgrade to a pro account you get rid of the adds and you get to send much bigger files.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
[…] Pownce - which I didn’t have time to write on - is covered in depth by DeepJiveInterests (underwhelmed), Frantic Industries (its IM with better multi-person chatting), ValleyWag (underwhelmed), CenterNetworks (actually tried it, loved it), and ParisLemon (acquisition bait?). […]
June 28th, 2007 at 6:18 am
I think it’s much more an expansion on the twitter concept than instant messaging. I’ve been using it since last night. It definitely has some potential - now to see if twitter people will switch to Pownce as their main thing once it goes public.
June 28th, 2007 at 6:53 am
@Paul: Twitter is instant messaging in web form (:
June 28th, 2007 at 9:08 am
i think trillian astra is going to be much more impressive
July 1st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
[…] Well, sometimes it fires back. Pownce seemed like just another web-based IM application, but it turned out to be a new Twitter - only better. […]