A potential Sign of Things to Come: Pownce Announces Impending Shut Down
// December 1st, 2008 // Social Media
A few years ago I decided to jump on to the microblogging bandwagon. No, not Twitter… My first foray into this space was actually with “Pownce”, which not only acts as a microblogging platform, but a mish-mash of event announcement, file sharing, link sharing and a whole slew of other things. It was probably the first app I’ve ever used that leveraged the Adobe AIR platform, and was a nice introduction into the potential of things to come. However, much like the results of the Messenger wars in the late 90’s Pownce did not capture a critical mass of audience and was beaten to the punch by Twitter and Jaiku.
Where did Pownce go wrong? They had a pretty decent UI to most of their properties, offered a nice app right off the bat and certainly had a great concept.
The problem? Well… Nothing really. It did the same thing as the rest of the platforms out there. That wasn’t the issue. Maybe the issue was simplicity, maybe the issue was simply being late to the microblogging game as Twitter was already out and being leveraged for all kinds of nifty/sneaky/crafty purposes.
Whatever the reason was, we can certainly look to Pownce as an example of KISS. They built the be-all-end-all app, but early adopters aren’t looking for the swiss army knives. They’re looking for the fresh out of the factory - oops we forgot to install safety features - machete of a knife.
Twitter is still that machete. It hasn’t built out an obscene amount of added value tools, as everyone seems to have done that for them already. The entire app is basically a giant RSS feed of people’s thoughts/pitches/responses and the audience has made it their own goal to build supporting tools around it.
If you’re interested in seeing what’s been built or what kinds of tools you can use to add to Twitter, check out the following sites:
Brightkite - http://brightkite.com/
Brightkite allows you to leverage GPS data to add geographic context to your tweets, ie. “I’m at a bar located at [GPS position] at a surprise Foo Fighters show”.
Tweetscan - http://tweetscan.com/
Tweetscan allows you to see who’s saying what about “x”.
Twitpic - http://twitpic.com/
If you can’t tell from the name, Twitpic allows you to share photos through Twitter.
There are many others, but this was supposed to be a post about Pownce :P.
