Pownce - A Quick First Take
Now that Pownce has been out of beta and open to anyone for 45 minutes, I'm not that impressed. A quick friend import from Twitter yielded 'Jack Dorsey' as the first option, which I found amusing. I was looking for an option to request they all be friended, but there was none. It must be done one by one, which can take quite some time if you have a lot of friends. They also have a list of 'Featured Powncers,' which is nice, although there was a "server 500 error" very quickly, only for adding that one friend, and it was several minutes until I could request to add them. They also have a 'Friend of My Friends' feature, which would be nicer if it listed more than a few people. As with Twitter, there are settings to adjust as to how you want to view your messages, as well as others, Pownce having more flexibility with it. However, this also leads to more complexity. One of Twitter's greatest strengths is its simplicity. Pownce has a variety of ways to send links and files, although most Twitter users prefer linking to outside places with Twitter's built in Tiny URL feature. Perhaps the only thing Pownce offers that virtually every Twitterite would like to have, is the ability to put friends into groups. There is always an occasion you would like to send a message to a select group, and that would really be the only way you can efficiently do it. Twitter's greatest weakness thus far has been it's downtimes, which they are addressing later today with a capacity expansion, as indicated on user's Twitter pages. All in all, I'll continue using Pownce throughout the week, to get a better feel for it, but I'm fairly certain that Twitter will still reign supreme. The next few weeks and months will be interesting as they duke it out.
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