Twitter, Pownce and Tumblr - Thoughts
Each of these Social Networking / Microblogging services have their uses:
Twitter I find is great for short bursts of information and ‘doing’ updates.
Pownce for sharing information - whether it be a link, photo, video, song or file.
Tumblr for… well…. I want to use it for more in-depth thoughts and long-form posts. However its primary functions are very similar to Pownce so I have to be very careful not to use it in the same fashion.
The first time I used Twitter, I found it rather boring and dull. There weren’t many people I knew of to follow, so the whole experience was rather empty. It was several months later when I heard about Pownce on an episode of Diggnation. Not long after, Kevin Rose made a list of ‘interesting people to follow’ on Pownce - this was extremely useful. I suppose this was the reason why I was with Pownce for so long at the beginning.
Now though I find the sheer amount of people on Twitter make it a much more viable option, but I still can’t shake the feeling the Pownce community ia more newbie friendly, and not nearly as web-celebrity focused.
The 'V' Word
New Pownce Features Incoming - What to Expect
It seems that after all this time of outages, blank white screens and other problems, Pownce is going to get some major upgrades and new features.
Leah Culver on PownceCast said at Pownce HQ they were trying really hard to fix the common problems that were plaguing Pownce users every day. And it seems that she is speaking the truth - there have been less outages and other problems since they moved the API database over to another new server.
Now users are seeing more features being touted by the Pownce developer team - FireEagle integration. This will enable Powncers to “share your location with sites and services online,” while having “control over your data and privacy”. Origination of the note is also being implemented, as seen in the picture. It gives a little note similar to Twitter that says whether the note was sent from the iPhone app, desktop app, and others.
Judging by Leah’s activity on her Flickr account, the Pownce Pagination may also get an update. For now you have to click through from one page to another consecutively, which can take some time to go back only a few hours’ worthof notes.
On gifting Pownce pro accounts Leah has said “We’ve been thinking of doing that, it’s definitely something We’ll add in once we have the time”. There have also been rumours of more features for pro users in the pipeline soon.
If most of these features are implemented, Pownce will stand clearly ahead of other micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter and Plurk. The only issue now is to maintain a scalable platform with as few outages and downtime as possible to avoid defections.
