bartknows's dashboard

That concept "imagine having an "RSS Inbox" where friend request messages come in and you're able to act on them from that inbox instead of going to the original site" - reminds me of Matt Webb's 'RSSi' : http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/29/...

And to add to this, I also disabled all my notifications via email. Too annoying to have to visit the site every time. I found more friction than value in the process of doing so. :)

While I think Lane is going in the right direction in point out hte competition between 37sigs and Le Pownce, I side with Chris by adding that if this were truly a good closed productivity solution, it would execute group functionality, something I talked with Ev about over at the twitter camp a while back. AND it would make the posted information transparent form my email.

Two cases to point out: I don't want to have to private message everyone on my team, and I love grandCentral's implementation of voicemail notification. Hot hot hot.

I can't wait to pick the Powncers brains.

Perhaps not "confuse" so much as "blur."

I don't necessarily *confuse* my personal and professional life, but because my friends are freelancers too, we often have a bunch of overlap between personal and professional. Pownce seems really good for both being able to exchange files/info and figuring out where we're going for a beer later.

Great point about confusing the personal/professional. With so many folks doing their own thing these days--and doing business through friend networks-- this is a potentially significant wave to catch.

Well, one suspects Pownce is still figuring out exactly what kind of app it's trying to be, but if I were in charge I'd build out the small group focus without losing the app's sense of fun or dropping its more non-business-oriented uses.

One thing I would love about this -- I enjoy the idea of this seamless mixing of the personal (mp3s from friends) and the professional (docs I want to share with my team.) Maybe it's just because I frequently confuse my personal and my professional life, and so this approach fits my mental model better.

Actually, I think it's more of a contest between traditional, simple, "dumb network apps" like email and blogs that are the ongoing competitive threat, if not simply because of inertia.

I think it'd be interesting to see Pownce go in the direction of Basecamp competitor, but it feels to open and loose right now to really be a contender in that domain. I do think that the aspect of passing notes among a small group is a cool idea and I really like Jeremy Keith's depiction of that idea...

That said, so far I'm finding it really hard to integrate Pownce into my workflow -- the email alerts are less than useful and I've turned them completely off.

What I'd like to see is an OpenID-based messaging layer that you subscribe to like RSS but have the ability to push messages back up the stack -- so imagine having an "RSS Inbox" where friend request messages come in and you're able to act on them from that inbox instead of going to the original site. *That* would be a major productivity booster.

Pownce is definitely an improvement for lightweight collaboration over Basecamp, even in its closed beta state. For one thing, I've always hated having to ask the question: "Your Basecamp or mine?" Social software means not having siloed spaces that create redundant effort, and walls where there should be links. I'm excited to see how Pownce continues to evolve the state of the art.