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/
Hey, do you have invitations left? I would like to get one!
Any chance you have any invites left? I would be very very grateful.
newtux [at] gmail [.] com
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.
Send me an invitation please.
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.
one thing I don’t like so far about Pownce is I can’t read/send messages via txt like i can with twitter.
@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.
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.
Invitation please.. e-mail : toufeeqh _at_ gmail _dot_ com
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.
Can anyone please send me an invitation to davegloop@yahoo.de ? Thanks alot!
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.