I should call it review of the month. But WTF, It is my blog. OK, before we star I’d better clarify some points.
1) Leah, maybe you’ re hot. But if you ever considered adding me as a friend please DO NOT READ what follows (Im sorry but my sarcasm-o-meter has gone off scale and blown out)
2) When I mention pownce, 50% of the times that word can be substituted by jaiku, twitter and similar sites.
3) Do not take any of this too seriously
Now that we clarified things, for those of you that are lazy, I have made a visual summary of what Im going to say
Please James Tiberius, enlighten us.
There you go. I have been “using” pownce for a couple of weeks (barely, I must say) and the thing that grieves me the most is that I don’ t see all the superhandyness claimed by everyone. Yes, It is nice and easy. But as all the rest of social sites that I know so far it is based on proselytism. To make it easy to understand. What Im going to do in a place that requires you to have friends If I have no friends?. “You already had some” you may possibly claim. In such case I would be using twitter or who knows what. Therefore I should drag all my friends to pownce to enjoy it as is supposed to be.
What I really do not understand of social sites is that they only work well if you already have a bunch of friends. Not my case because I am a sociopath. I remember the old good days of IRC, the best tool to get to know people IMHO. Nowadays, the concept of friend has been lowered so much that sometimes I believe has lost its original meaning. Half of the people I have as IM contacts probably would stab me in the face without too much problem or remorse. Thats why I have them under “phony bastards” and not “friends”. They are amusing anyway, that’s why I keep them. For the same reason I do not like to ask people I do not know at all to be my friend. Yes, there are individuals with 6543 friends. How nice.
Being more technical. I see the site still unstable in terms of availability. Im becoming used to see our dearest friend Ackbar saying hello. But I do not want to be too harsh with this
Next thing. PLEASE RELEASE THE PUBLIC API. I know. You did not have time and will be done. But If you want pownce to be successful, you NEED to do this. I sound like a 80 old years old granpa but should you had done this thing right from the beginning you would not need to re-implement it now
Yet another thing. Using AIR as a runtime. Please ,please, please. Don’t tell me that It is super-useful No, seriously. If I had to choose a runtime for my application to be multi platform and well tested I would have chosen….I dunno…. JAVA??. .Maybe even Mono. Anyway I do not see a great advantage in using the client to post.
And now the wishlist. If anyone makes this It would be GREAT!!. Maybe what Im going to say is a complete madness, but correct me if Im wrong. The big problem I see with all this places for “microblogging” (if I can call it this way) is, as I said, the isolation between them. You use twitter, jaiku or pownce or whatever. If you have different groups of friends using different sites then you are torn apart (metaphorically). My question is, It would be very complicated to create some kind of XML cross-talk between these sites?. Like jabber. For me, jabber was the reason to forget all the fragmented IM networks and the wars between them. The great unification, without having to pull down your pants. It means you can use a server with a feature (say, file transfers) that may work only inside your server but you can always communicate with other people with jabber address regardless of the server, period.
Same way. I would like to see something like “I add foo@twitter.com as a friend in pownce” and the messages are conveyed from one site to another. If you want to cut back some features in the communications is ok, but It would be great anyway. And no, I do not mean to post the same thing in several places.
I know what I say sounds selfish, but it is the user perspective. Of course we all want to make money, so we look forward to grab as many users as possible. Nevertheless, captivity may increase your user quota, but Im pretty sure they will be less happy an, therefore, so will you.
Ack!. That’s all by now.
