Recently active discussions in Pownce

I am porting messages as public but they are not appearing on general messages

Pownce is dying. Twitter, plurk and other services are killing it because it is too slow. I think pownce needs speed up, couple of *good* new features and some hype about those features. (maybe beta?)

I love pownce, but other peoples are leaving it...

We're updating the friend request process right now so you're pending friend requests will be back soon. Now when you send a new friend request, you can send a personal message too!

Hi my name is aburd (at least on Pownce it is) and I want to love Pownce more than I do. I love the concept of sharing events, thoughts, experiences, links, videos, music, and whatever you can think of and then discussing it. I think it is the perfect environment to create a community and I love being a part of it.

But I have something that is keeping me from being flat out in love with Pownce. It's the stability issue. This is what I see whenever half to 2/3rds of the time that I try to open the Pownce page.

http://flickr.com/photos/burd/2468804...

The app works but I don't get to play with all the embedded goodies when I go that route. It's only half of the fun experience that Pownce usually is.

I posted about this earlier but I called it a 500 error or something. And I'm not sure that is what the problem is. It just isn't loading. No errors, just a blank screen. So I want to reclassify it correctly.

I guess I just wanted to alert you fine Pownce people about this problem. And also let you know that your site is wonderful but this is a pretty big problem.

i had a few people but deleted them and i can still see their previous posts.
i don't want to see those after i delete or unfriend someone.

I recently received an email from Pownce telling me about a couple of new features, among them the introduction of RSS feeds for all messages, both public and private. Apparently the feed URL is secured only through adding an additional 8 character password, meaning that should anyone ever get their hands on the RSS feed URL, they would be able to read all my messages.

Even though for someone like me who still does only receive a fraction of the email notifications and could thus use this new feature as an alternative to be notified of new messages this might appear like a great feature at first, I find it a bit, say careless to offer such an option, as now it is potentially possible to read all my messages without having to log in.

Am I being paranoid here or would any of You agree that I just might have a valid point?

Thanks for Your opinions on the matter!

What do people think about friends vs fans on Pownce?

Is it best to have heaps of friends, and no fans? Or better to just keep people you know as friends and the rest as fans?

Do you find it difficult to manage lots of friends? Feel lonely with only a few friends and lots of fans? Do fans comment as much as friends?

Lots of questions, I know. But I'm just curious.

If you have invites why not share them here? If you need one I've got 6 left. Email me ted[at]getsatisfaction[dot]com.

[update] I'm out of invites for now. Feel free to continue the sharing below

[Update 07/10/07] I have 6 more invites!

Hey Guys!

I think there are some connection issues today. I've been getting "Connection Timed Out" errors on Firefox.

Of course, I have AT&T DSL, so who knows which end it's on.

I don't have many friends who know what Pownce or Twitter are... and I have a hard time convincing them to try it out. I would like to be able to search out "new" friends on Pownce, by their location. Would anyone else find this helpful?

s the a limit on the number of people that can be placed in a set, if so how many? I have 9 in a set and it seems thats all i can add...

That's it.

I've fixed 2 bugs today. If you've been trying to register and get a 500 error, please try to register again. There was a problem where if you were using a username that someone else had, you would get an error. If you've been trying to reset your password, please go to http://pownce.com/login and enter your email address to reset your password. I fixed an bug with entering a new password.

Thanks for all your help!! I'm doing the best I can to fix problems with Pownce. Sorry it takes some time.

Powncing - to share a little bit of everything through Pownce!

I'm starting to quickly love Pownce! and I love powncing with my friends.

But I'm sure that's not the meaning behind the name.

The tubes have been abuzz with the Twitter/Pownce comparisons all week, and it's not like I didn't do my part, but I've come to the realization that Pownce has nothing on Twitter -- Pownce is gunning for Jason Fried.

In retrospect, I (and everybody else) made the comparison because, like Twitter, Pownce "streams" tiny bits of info from your friends in one nice, long, easily digestible list. One that's also kind of like Facebook. And not that different from my Flickr photostream. Or my Del.icio.us friends' links. Or any of the other myriad number of apps that have adopted a similar approach.

The "stream" -- let's call it that, because "river" just doesn't cut it -- is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It'll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places. Let's not confuse the functionality of a site with its overall purpose, in the same way we don't confuse Amazon with, say, Panic Software just because they both have a checkout process.

So, what's Pownce's purpose? And what's Twitter's, for that matter?

Based on what I've heard about Twitter's recent round of fundraising, which is rumored to be at a damn high valuation, as well as Ev's recent post about going big, I'd say that Twitter's making a huge infrastructure play. They want to undergird presence online, at least the short messaging part of it, and I'm guessing they'll eventually go even bigger than that. Twitter wants to be a utility, powering presence across a variety of devices, contexts, applications and services -- a huge engine moving the stream along. More power to them -- they've got the uptake and traction in that direction already, and when they make it they'll be in a highly defensible position, because real-time presence is (as their recent woes have demonstrated) *really freaking hard*.

And Pownce? Well, Pownce is a lightweight productivity app, built on top of the stream, and it has all the pluses and minuses of a productivity app (including that you can use it to share music with friends!) The Pownce kids have mentioned in a couple of places that the genesis of the application came from a desire for a more effective way to share files than IM and email, and though the app has obviously developed well past that initial point it still has deep roots down to that goal. Around the Satisfactory, we're talking about using it that way -- creating a Pownce set for everybody who's on the team to share, and then trading relevant work files with each other on it. Lightweight, streamed, persistent, scannable, understandable, simple. For our quick and agile approach to design and development, that's just about perfect.

So, who's the reigning king of lightweight productivity tools online, and who have we been using for that purpose up until now? 37Signals, makers of Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire, online apps designed to help people collaborate in a predominantly business but occasional personal setting.

37Signals has done a great job of remaking traditional enterprise tools in a lightweight, online, distributed environment, but they've been much slower (recent OpenID integration notwithstanding) and even somewhat disinclined to integrate the newer social tools that we're seeing deployed on sites like Pownce. Where 37Signals is slimming down bloated business software, which is a form of reinvention, Pownce is actually applying new ideas to traditional models and genuinely reinventing them in the process.

Not to mention the Pownce Pro pricing model. At $20/year, it's not a big-money model, and it'll definitely never get to Twitter-level valuations. That's a 37Signals sized pricing model right there.

So it's Pownce versus 37Signals, and what fun to see how this plays out, especially once Pownce starts finetuning their application (breaking out file types into individual categories, anyone?) I wouldn't even be surprised if eventually the streaming aspect of Pownce ends up being Twitter-powered. Because, did I mention, presence scaling is really hard?

Finally, if you had to set up two company founders in a cage match, which would you rather see -- Ev versus Kevin (eh), or Leah versus Jason? I rest my case.

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