Maybe I’m a doof, but Pownce just isn’t ringing my bell.
Sure, it’s a cool social media application. It allows file sharing, networking, link sharing, and event coördination, but it might be just too late for me.
I’ve already established a profile on Twitter and Jaiku. I marry them together through the magic of RSS and a handy little online application called TwitKu: I enter my ‘tweet’ once, in a single window, and it’s sent to both networks…a very sweet tweet 
Pownce doesn’t have anything like that. Pownce just doesn’t show me a stream of all my friends, unlike Twitter and Jaiku. Sure, I could take all my Pownce friends and manually add them to a Feedblendr (hey, where did that ‘e’ go?) feed, but every time I added a new Pownce friend, I’d have to update my Feedblendr feed. Too much work.
So, for now, my Pownce account is seeing little usage. I do have a few Pownce invites for anyone who wants to take it for a spin…but if you really want to partake in my ‘lifestream’, then check out my Twitter or my Jaiku feeds.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I tend to agree with you about Pownce, Brad. I received an invite, and setup an account, but I don’t really “get” it. Maybe it’s because I already use Twitter, but Pownce doesn’t seem to be anything special, to me. Besides, everything I can do with Pownce (sending files, communicating, etc.), I can already do with good ol’ fashioned email.
BTW: Are you at all involved in the art scene in Edmonton? You look very familiar, but I know we’ve never met, so I’m not sure why I recognize your face.
Hey Adam,
Thanks for your comment. I too am pretty embedded in a number of existing technologies that Pownce replicates…and am not about to drop them and move all my contacts to the ‘next big thing’.
What we really need is a universal profile manager, something that keeps all our info centralized, that we can just ‘apply’ to whatever application we want.
…and that is the holy grail of social media apps.
re: arts scene…not really. I spent some time at BioWare, and United Way, and before that was with ITV/Global TV doing tech stuff…so it’s possible our paths have crossed. For more detail, check out my LinkedIn profile…feel free to add me if you’re on LinkedIn…networking has its advantages.
A universal profile manager would be great, and it’s something that a lot of people are talking about (although, to my knowledge, it’s a lot of talk and not a lot of action at this point in time). Hopefully, someone will build an application that can do this in the near future.
Yeah, a good universal profile manager would certainly save time for users, and likely application developers too.
I think OpenID is coming close. Now, if there was a way to tie an OpenID ID, with ‘YourFavouriteContactListManager’ app, and allow the two to communicate with authentication to other applications, then there would be a great system.
Off topic, but, I think I know where I recognized you from. I see on your LinkedIn profile that you freelance for a lot of newspapers. Have you ever had a headshot for any of your articles? I think that might be why your face looked familiar to me, despite having never met in person.
Heh, could be. I’m not sure if a headshot was used or not.