Pownce Review

Posted by Andy Atkinson on August 20, 2007 | Post type: Gain

Pownce lets users post messages, links, files, or events. Messages posted to an account page are viewable by friends and "fans" of an individual. Once a message is posted, it can be replied to and forwarded, and there are a couple options for recipients (such as users that have not yet received the message). Pownce requires an age and zip code to create an account, somewhat intrusive by today's privacy standards. The sign-up page has a real-time validation effect that is very nice, and the website and application are very attractive in general. Sign-ups are by "invitation only" at this time, but anyone can sign-up for an invitation on the Pownce site.

Pownce account page

Pownce provides a text box to search for contacts that may be using the service. Users can either approve friend requests of deny them, which means the contact becomes a "fan." Pownce also suggests "friends of friends."

I'd like to see Pownce (and any social networking app) query Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other webmail APIs the way Facebook does, checking if my email contacts are existing Pownce users, then giving me the option to invite them if they aren't.

Posting notes

Facebook recently added the ability to message people via email addresses, outside of Facebook. Pownce would be a nice platform to send messages to both Pownce users and email recipients outside the network, though the Pownce team likely prefers getting new users to sign-up instead. It will be interesting to see a common message format that lets people message contacts across several social networking application. For example, authoring one message and sending it to your Facebook, Pownce, and traditional email contacts.

Posting messages and links worked as expected. A common problem web applications try to solve is uploading multiple files, such as several photos. Pownce wants users to create ZIP files and does not offer any type of drag-and-drop for their web client (which requires access to the local file system via a Java applet for example). Unfortunately the standalone Pownce client does not support multiple file drag-and-drop either, so users are limited to one file at a time, with a max size of 10MB.

Since the AIR and desktop Pownce application are being served from Amazon's S3 service, I'll bet the Pownce team is using S3 for user storage as well. This lets them leverage the S3 scalable and distributed infrastructure, while keeping their initial storage and infrastructure costs low--great benefits for a startup. I'd like to see Pownce support multiple file upload via drag-and-drop, in future releases of the desktop client.

Calendar integration

The Pownce Calendar feature unfortunately offers no integration with Google Calendar or other calendaring services. Integrating the Google Calendar API into Pownce is likely something the team is exploring. Posting Events to my Pownce calendar and having them show up on Google Calendar would be nice. Another approach would be to produce a calendar that I could subscribe to using my Google Calendar account.

I also saved an Outlook Calendar invitation as a .ics file (iCalendar) and was hoping to drag this onto the Event portion of the Pownce desktop application, but Pownce treats it as a regular File. I'd like to see Pownce integrated with Google Calendar and accept .ics files as Pownce Events.

Subscriptions

Pownce offers RSS subscriptions of public notes from an individual user, or public notes from a user plus their friends.

Ratings

Pownce also has a feature that allows you to rate messages coming in from your friends. This could be used in different ways, to recall important messages by their rating for example, but I felt like tags would be more useful than a 5-star rating system.

One thing I don't understand, is why I am able to rate my own messages. I expected ratings to be disabled for my own messages. Rating the posts from my friends when replying makes sense, and seeing the combined ratings from a community is a neat way to quickly scan for interesting messages.

Customizations

Pownce allows users to change the themes of their public profiles, and offers several color selections.

Pownce has several options for Notifications, allowing granular email subscriptions for various events in Pownce that generate emails to the address used at sign-up. There are no SMS subscription options at this time, but I assume the team is exploring mobile text messaging. I know when I met with Leah last in Minneapolis, she expressed interest in Dodgeball-like applications (possibly developing her own) that allow friends to stay in touch via SMS/text messaging.

Desktop application

Available for Windows and OS X (with Linux support on the way), Pownce is available for use as a desktop application. It requires installation of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly called Apollo. Installation on Windows takes just a few seconds. Once AIR is installed, the Pownce desktop app install takes a few seconds, requiring just a few user clicks. The installation files seem to be served from Amazon S3. The build I installed says "Alpha 2" and has a nice transparency effect, however the desktop application offers no additional features beyond what is available online, so I don't see any reason to install it at this time.

Pownce desktop application

More

Pownce is also an advertising channel, charging a flat rate of $3 for an ad (a Pownce "note") that is displayed 1000 times. More information on the Advertise page.

Development of an API is underway according to this Pownce blog post. Programmers using the API might come up with some clever ways to move the user-generated data around or display it in a different way, for example the classic Google Maps mashup that displays Pownce user activity via "pins on the map" from around the world.

Pownce offers a Pro account for $20 per year, which includes no advertising and other features.

Don't miss the Pownce blog for the latest information.

About the author(s)

Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

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