Sunday 8 July 2007

Pownce - My Vote Apparently Is In

Just realised that the only reason I used Pownce was because it hadn't been blocked at work last week so I checked it from time to time.

This weekend I've checked sporadically from home but felt not the least bit compelled to write anything. In the same space of time I've sent half a hundred tweets though.

So apparently it's official, Pownce just isn't working for me. Dissection, please:

Web client app is s-l-o-w. I'm on a POS laptop to begin with and it barely copes with multiple tabs in FireFox let alone huge Ajax apps. (Or whatever Pownce has.) So it locks up the laptop on me from time to time, takes ages to refresh, and because my broadband is really not all that hot, it (worst of all) loses my last.fm buffer.

AIR is not a common platform. And the Pownce app is kind of buggy, kind of flaky, and doesn't do most of the things I can do (albeit very slowly!) in the web client app.

Pownce people are nice, and it's good to have a file/link/calendar sharing system built in to share stuff with them. But that shouldn't be Pownce's only feature.

Groups. Now that's a nice feature. I can group friends into (say) geographical locations, and interest groups, and even (shudder) work related peeps. But that's all I could do. Literally. Every time I tried to create a new group after that, nothing. Delete my work related peepsand I can create a new group again. The bloody thing has a limit of three groups!

Which brings me to my last reason for going off Pownce. Response time, peoples! They have response millenia! I asked about the groups thing days ago, still waiting for a response. I found a few other things, gave them a compliment on some things I liked, and made a few suggestions. The night I joined Pownce. I'm still waiting...

Pownce will have to hand over development to some other company or team at some stage. They certainly don't appear to be coping now. And only if the next (or revised, or fired up withnew enthusiasm) dev team are prepared todo a few hard yards and make the changes in code, functionality, and attitude, will Pownce ever get to where it should be.

Are you listening Pownce? We would really like the following:

  • Light fast web client.
  • .NET or Java PC client.
  • More groups.
  • RSS feeds. Come on, the one thing Jaiku had over Twitter was the lifestreaming capability, and that *nearly* got Jaiku off the ground! And you've left it out!
I know there were more requests, too.
  • A block setting for shutting out dickheads.
  • Umm in groups view, a bit more information on friends, like location. The most basic - and most useful - classification of my friends isn't based on their names, it's either based on what's in their bio, or in their location info.
  • More groups. Honestly!
  • Let us make our themes.

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