Pownce, off the cuff
A few days ago I started to play around with Pownce, a recent new player in the ever expanding social webapp scene, roughly similar to Twitter.
I was a bit sceptical starting out, for three reasons.
1. The word “social” can easily mean “recycled crap” at this point in the game
2. It’s hard for me to think of Kevin Rose (part of the Pownce team) without thinking of the huge volume of vapid script kiddies that hang on his every word, or the general quality of Digg comments (not directly his fault, of course)
3. To be truthful, it’s built on Django, and as an ex-Pythonista and passionate Rubyist we know what framework I prefer.
Now, on to reality and a few days later…
The featureset is pretty compelling. With finer grained dissemination controls, a first class “reply” feature, and the obvious benefits of having message types like Event and File, Pownce is already far less of a “toy” application than Twitter feels after several months of regular use. The fact Pownce offers a Flickr-like pro subscription is also nice, since it shows some forethought occurred as to monetization – which will hopefully stave off some scalability issues through generous use of hardware/staffing as well as limit advertising.
The design, in my opinion, is certainly better than Twitter’s. Twitter’s tiny hairline-bordered sidebar with the kitschy palette of friends is habitually annoying and not particularly intuitive, whereas Pownce’s interface, while certainly not perfect, seems reasonably put together.
Of course everything isn’t rosy; I ran into a few small issues, including it inexplicably not being able to handle PNG profile images – but it seems to be pretty stable for what’s most certainly a newly released application. I’d like to see some further development – like a published and open API with integration with other services, but as a developer I understand these things take time.
So, to wrap up, let’s address my initial concerns:
1. On social sites: although these are commonly used elements on social sites, this seems to integrate them in what feels like a very cohesive interface, and keeps things simple without making them too stupid.
2. On Kevin: he’s just a part of a team, and thanks to the friend controls, I can insulate myself from the aforementioned hangers-on and comment message trolls.
3. On Django: liking or not liking an application for the underlying framework is pretty stupid; understanding when you’re the developer and when you’re the user is smart, so I’ll step back and see Pownce for what it is; a pretty clever use of a framework I don’t prefer but can appreciate.
You can find me at Twitter here and Pownce here. If you’d like a Pownce invitation, contact me – there’s a chance I have one handy.
