When they announced Pownce, I wrote that I didn’t believe in the idea of a Twitter with more options, because the whole point of Twitter is precisely its simplicity. Now that I’m in the beta (thanks, T.), I can confirm my intuition: the home page feels much too complex, and less friendly, than Twitter’s — too many options, too many menus.
Contrary to what I thought, though, the ability to post text, links, files and events works well: the interface is reminiscent of Tumblr’s with pseudo-tabs above the form that let you switch between modes. And you’re not going to get it wrong — you’re not going to accidentally use the event form to post a link, since the fields are not the same and the difference is quite visible. But that’s not the case when it comes to choosing who will receive your pownce: sure, when you look at Twitter, you think some granularity would be nice, but it’s actually a bad idea that only creates confusion.
In the web version, the form doesn’t remember the previous recipient, so that you’ve got to pick “the public” every time you post, if you’re going to be tweeting; in the desktop version, the previous recipient is automatically selected, so that I already sent a message to the wrong person once, even though I only posted a dozen pownces in all. There’s just no good way to offer that choice, because a select box is a wrong interface for something you’ve got to input every time (it’s not visible enough, too easily forgotten) and there’s no possible better interface (you’ve got to list every contact and every group).
That doesn’t mean Pownce can’t be good at something — just that it’s not a good Twitter replacement (unless you factor in Kevin Rose and Digg’s weights, which might tip the scale): it’ll never be as accessible, intuitive and natural. Even though Pownce is prettier and doesn’t limit message length (but is that an advantage? sure, the limit is sometimes frustrating, but it’s a really interesting incentive to think twice about what you’re posting and the best way to pen it).
Where Pownce might shine is as a mini groupware solution, letting you sync calendars and share files with your partners on various projects — whether you’re organizing a group blog or podcast, or you’re a student with group projects. In that case it’s not about telling the world how you feel in the most organic way, but just having the most convenient solution to share data, with a purpose. And, for that, Pownce is definitely more efficient than email (once you made your partners register too).
It will all depend on how they target their network — and I’m unfortunately not sure they actually know who they’re going after, and the home page makes a lot of references to “your friends,
” so we’ll just have to see if the beta lets them realize what their creation can actually be useful for. Because it sure doesn’t look like they have any idea for now.
Pownce isn’t Twitter, or Facebook, or Blogger or Tumblr; there’s a very viable market in students needing a groupware solution that’s both cool and simple, but the site’s creators will need to know what they’re selling them.
If you want to test for yourselves, I have a dozen invites left and the contact form is linked from the top right corner of this page. (Make sure to let me know what email address I should give Pownce.)
Incidentally, I wanted to make sure everyone’s aware I’d already had the following idea before, and the day I use it I won’t be copying Pownce:
Also, the AIR (née Apollo) application is very buggy and borderline unusable, but I’m quite impressed to see what you can do with your interface (assuming it also works in Windows, which should be possible in XP and up):
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