Received a Pownce invite from Techcrunch’s newly purchased inviteshare.com. I’d like to say that inviteshare is not just a great idea but the design and implementation is wonderful. I received my invite to Pownce in less than 5 minutes of requesting it; I just hope the demonoid invite get fulfilled through it’s small community.
On to my early impressions of Pownce:
It’s been compared to Twitter but it’s completely missing the mobility of Twitter and the accessibility of Twitter. Without an API it’s going to be very hard to get updates of what’s going on over there and actually updating your friends requires you to login to the site or use the AIR application they’ve released.
That AIR application is rather bulky. Not in application size or overhead, I’m actually sure it’s very light using the Adobe framework but the design of the app is too simple. You can’t change the style, transparency or size and I do not need anything else on my desktop. That’s what I love about Twitter because I already have IM open and getting updates through IMs and sending messages through IM fits perfectly into my mobility. Pownce is lacking in this area to the tune of null.
The feature set is everything that I’d ever want in a mini/social-blog. You can send files, separate links out, post files or events and it’s not just posting it’s all about sending. You can easily segment out your friends and send only to them or just individually. I actually love this because it’s completely personal and it makes sense and very similar to facebook.
facebook allows you to be completely private and pownce walks the line. I really enjoy how there are fans and friends but I wish I could ask to be a fan or make a freind a fan instead. A few of my “friends” aren’t actual friends but I don’t want to remove them. I love the personalization of pownce. Not for interface personalization because there isn’t any but the personalization and segmentation you give to your friends and fans is perfect.
I do see pownce replacing Twitter (for me) on shear feature set, unless Twitter kicks it up a notch but it’s going to take me a long time without being free’d up a little. Since I really don’t want to loose my twitter blog on this site I don’t know what to do, especially since it pownce does replace Twitter here it could handle all the comments. So unless I think of another way to merge the two services (maybe RSS splicing and an RSS module in the sidebar replacing the tweets to the right) it will take a while.
As you can tell I really like pownce and I’ll wait for it to replace anything but I will still use the service and hopefully you’ll join me.