Pownce Opened Up

Posted on January 22, 2008 One Comment

Pownce became generally available early this morning and also released an updated client (AIR based).

If you have been curious about Pownce, you can now give it a try without having to wrangle an invitation (granted, I didn’t notice that being an issue up to this point…).

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more.

So far, I haven’t noticed any dramatic client differences, beyond the fact that I can now actually run it with the current version of Adobe’s AIR. It works great, though I wouldn’t mind seeing some more color options beyond the brown/lime theme. The ability to minimize to the tray would be ok too…

I suppose there will be quite a few articles comparing/contrasting Pownce to Twitter. I’m still trying to wrap my head around both, so don’t have much to offer yet. They definitely aren’t the same thing, but they definitely have some overlap in functionality. Honestly, I wonder how many folks will bother with having both.

I have noticed a few key differences though:Pownce makes it a lot easer to actually have discussions in more of a flat forum style. Pownce also makes it easier to share links and files as well. The built in mp3 player is kind of spiffy for the podcasters.

I’d say the key to enjoying both Pownce and Twitter is finding enough interesting folks to follow or “friend” to keep a bit of traffic flowing through them. At least, that’s been the key for me — and I need to find more for Pownce. If I don’t see some activity, it feels stale and I stop monitoring it.

Too much activity, however, is bad for some pretty obvious reasons related to productivity!

The Pownce site is pretty slow today, hopefully that’s just due to a bit of opening-day excitement and not a sign of scalability issues looming! If you join up, here’s a little button to find me: