Pownce, the Twitter Killer
I hate titles like “X is the Y killer” because they’re usually just a cheap way to grab attention. But, if there ever was a clearcut situation of a new application that completely eclipses an old, popular one, then it’s the case of Pownce vs. Twitter.
All Twitter fans know about Twitter’s slow development, frequent downtime, slowness and other problems that have plagued this simple but cool service from its beginning. The folks at Twitter were also quite slow in remedying them, and new, important, features were even more scarce.
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.
To quickly recap my thoughts about the service, it’s actually not IM, as the messages are not instant. It’s annoying, and it’s a big letdown, but I guess it’s just the matter of implementing some AJAX goodness and that it will happen sometime in the future.
As far as other options go, you can send files, messages, links and events to people, but - and this is the good part - you can choose exactly who you want to send stuff to. Although seemingly a no-brainer feature, this was my beef with Twitter from the beginning; using it seemed like shouting through my window, and this 1-way communication was far from useful. On Pownce, you can chat privately with someone or group your friends and acquintances into specific groups and send stuff to them by group. It makes it so much useful, I wonder how no one thought of it before.
Pownce also offers a decent number of settings, including message filtering by several criteria and themes. It doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have a public API yet, and this is where Twitter shines; but I’m not sure that Twitter reached such a degree of popularity that the presence of an API could make a big difference. In any case, it’s time for the folks at Twitter to wake up and smell the coffee, as Pownce has seriously upped the ante in this space.
All this said, i still feel there’s a lot of things that can be improved in personal communication space. I don’t particularly like e-mail because it’s not instant, and it limits the size of files you can send. It’s great if you want to send stuff to a lot of people at once. Instant messaging offers instant communication, but sending stuff to more than one person isn’t working all that well (yes, you can switch to chat mode but why do I have to do that every time I want to send a message or a file to more than one person on my friends list). Also, it usually provides no log of your previous messages, or this log is full of omissions (if you use IM at home and at work, for example), and it’s a pain to search it. Finally, there’s web-based personal communication - Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, the last of which fixes many of the problems that IM has, but, well, it’s still not working instantly. Plus, it doesn’t offer support for mobiles.
Someone should eliminate all these problems and create a killer application that will make me want to ditch all my previous IM clients. Will it be Pownce? It’s possible, but they still have quite a road ahead.
To join my Pownce profile go here: www.pownce.com/frantic/
July 1st, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Hey, do you have invitations left? I would like to get one!
July 1st, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Any chance you have any invites left? I would be very very grateful.
newtux [at] gmail [.] com
July 1st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[…] The one big thing that Pownce is also missing is an open API for developers. Now Stan Schroeder at FranticIndustries doesn’t feel that an API really made any difference to the wide adoption of Twitter It [Twitter] doesn?t, as far as I can tell, have a public API yet, and this is where Twitter shines; but I?m not sure that Twitter reached such a degree of popularity that the presence of an API could make a big difference. […]
July 1st, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Some invites here;
http://www.tangler.com/group/5558/topic/14691
It’s definitely trying to be a twitter killer, and with a bunch of my twits already Powncing it’s pretty easy to move.
I still only see both of them as a passing fancy. Just like the Internet!
I’m surprised facebook hasn’t done something more drastic to match these guys. It just still feels a step slower.
July 1st, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Send me an invitation please.
July 1st, 2007 at 8:43 pm
[…] Over at I, Platform, Eric Rice looks to have decided that it’s a Twitter-killer, especially given Twitter’s sluggish release cycle and recent stability issues. So has Stan Schroeder at FranticIndusties. […]
July 1st, 2007 at 10:06 pm
[…] Enter Pownce, which promised — through buzz, not official statement — to kill Twitter in precisely this manner. But having found a Pownce invite in my inbox this morning through the good offices of Patrick Ruffini, I can report that Pownce is emphatically not a Twitter-killer, no matter what Stan Schroeder says. Ignore its too cute by half signup process, and the fact that this has happened over twenty times in the past twelve hours; the bottom line with Pownce is that it fixes a few things that are wrong with Twitter, but lacks so many of Twitter’s positive features that it is decisively inferior to its predecessor in utility and promise. Pownce lets you segment and categorize your contacts; it supports multiple information formats with no limits on size; it allows for non-public communication; and it appears to be groping its way toward Facebook-style networking with user-profile features that Twitter utterly lacks. But that’s about it: unlike Twitter, Pownce has no apparent API available to third-party developers, and it has no ability whatsoever to push or receive information from multiple platforms. These are tremendous flaws — the latter is especially irksome for those who grew used to having access to 100% of Twitter merely by firing up their IM clients, or turning on their phones. Pownce, by contrast, makes you download a buggy bit of Pownceware to serve as a standalone client — and if you want to use Pownce from a mobile device, forget it. Perhaps Pownce thinks that I’ll abandon AdiumX, and all my IM contacts from the past fifteen years, for Pownce; or perhaps Pownce thinks that everyone will rush to Pownce in the fullness of time, thus obviating any need for Pownce to play nice with Jabber, AIM, et al. I think not. […]
July 1st, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I don’t buy the idea that Twitter is competing with IM. The 1-1 messaging is not the point of the thing, the 1-N broadcast is. And even if it were, there is clearly plenty of demand for the async style that they support.
For myself, IM is the last thing I go to Twitter for.
July 1st, 2007 at 11:30 pm
one thing I don’t like so far about Pownce is I can’t read/send messages via txt like i can with twitter.
July 1st, 2007 at 11:40 pm
@Lucas: I get your point, but at the same time I don’t get your point (:. Personally, I don’t see any point in 1:N broadcast outside of my blog. Maybe I just don’t see the point of blogging about your everyday life, but every time I used Twitter I felt I was using a crippled instant messenger.
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:15 am
I think twitter’s API played a major role in getting it popular; atleast in the community ( flash developers) that I belong. The fact that anyone can write a simple twitter application, just by parsing an XML made it an instant hit among developers. Think about applications like, twittervision, for example. APIs ARE a big deal.
AFAIK, Twitter was designed for 1-way communication. Users started using @username to do a two way communication! And now we complain, they didn’t get that feature correctly
If you would want to have a 2 way communication, IM should be your choice. And these problems that you have mentioned about IM’s archiving features, the’ve been completely wiped out with gtalk, ( even meebo does a good job with that!)
I’vent used pownce yet, so don’t know how good it is; May be their ‘invite-only’ signups would help them to have a controlled growth, unlike twitter, which suddenly saw a burst of users, and ended up having so many downtimes.
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:08 am
[…] FranticIndustries: Pounce, the Twitter killer. […]
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:22 am
Invitation please.. e-mail : toufeeqh _at_ gmail _dot_ com
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:23 am
[…] Not in Favor Uncov, humor site: Kevin Rose: YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG Wisdump: Pownce, A Twitter Competitor? Or Just Stardom Hype? Frantic Industries: Pownce the Twitter Killer […]
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:14 am
Warum es Twitter schwer haben wird — Pownce ist da…
Twitter hat Konkurrenz, aber dieses mal sind es nicht die Klone wie Jaiku oder Frazer die vor der Tür stehen, sondern ein ähnliches, aber besseres Konzept.Pownce, vom Digg-Gründer Kevin Rose, steht se……
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 am
I’ve seen more Pownce downtime than Twitter downtime lately, and then there was simultaneous downtime (which almost killed me!) I can deal with one service, but what about both?!
Pownce looks quite promising, but there are still things that need to be worked out. Still, I really do like it.
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:35 pm
[…] With the launch of the private beta of Pownce, the new microblogging network launched by Digg celebrities Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Leah Culver, people are claiming that it is the Twitter killer. After a somewhat heated debate with a friend, I’m not so sure that’s the case. At the present time, each microblogging platform has its pros … and its cons. Let’s look at the benefits to each and evaluate to see who is the victor. […]
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:01 am
Twitter v. Pownce…
Ignore its too cute by half signup process, and the fact that this has happened over twenty times in the past twelve hours; the bottom line with Pownce is that it fixes a few things that are wrong with Twitter, but lacks so many of Twitter’s positive …
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:13 pm
[…] The launch of Pownce and the big response it received from bloggers and users alike was so full of different explanations and definitions of this new tool that it’s safe to say that no one actually knows what it is. […]
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
[…] Pownce, the Twitter Killer - I hate titles like ?X is the Y killer? because they?re usually just a cheap way to grab attention. But, if there ever was a clearcut situation of a new application that completely eclipses an old, popular one, then it?s the case of Pownce vs. Twit Technorati Tags:backup, blog, blogger, cheatsheet, google, howto, mp3, pownce, twitterTag Links:backup, blog, blogger, cheatsheet, google, howto, mp3, pownce, twitter […]
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Pownce Pros and Cons…
A couple of days now into my experiment with Pownce.
A couple of months ago I started experimenting with ……
July 4th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Can anyone please send me an invitation to davegloop@yahoo.de ? Thanks alot!
July 6th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
So are email and IM dead? I can do everything this site does using the two. I just don’t see the reason to sign up for yet another account with another time wasting site. Maybe I am just old fashioned - oh wait, I am 25 so that can’t be it. Maybe I am just logical, or maybe I am just a clueless fool.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Pownce Invites…
My little bro Alex set me a Pownce invite the other day. Thanks Alex!
So, if for some reason you don’t have a Pownce account yet, I’ve got a bunch of invites to get rid of. Pownce is Kevin Rose’s (creator of Digg and host of Diggnation) lat…
July 10th, 2007 at 3:00 am
[…] What is it with these miniblogging/web messaging services that it’s so hard to keep them online? One of the biggest complaints over at Twitter was frequent downtime, and when Pownce launched, people that started using the service hoped for it to be much more stable than Twitter. […]
July 15th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
[…] Pownce the twitter killer […]
June 25th, 2008 at 10:31 am
[…] Last month when Twitter appeared to have suffered its worst downtime to date, many bloggers proposed that it would be delivered its final death blow by FriendFeed. Twitter survived, just as it did a year ago when it was also proposed that Pownce could be a destroyer. […]
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March 30th, 2009 at 4:08 am
It’s definitely trying to be a twitter killer, and with a bunch of my twits already Powncing it’s pretty easy to move. I still only see both of them as a passing fancy. Just like the Internet! I’m surprised facebook hasn’t done something more drastic to match these guys. It just still feels a step slower.
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