Pownce - 2 minute critique

Pownce, this thing is like a geek Teletubbie back in 1996, you all want one, your kids need one (er substitute kids with Diggish types and early adopters, which given the mixed metaphor about kids is a little weird!), but you can’t get one, you have to be invited, or in my case buy an invite on ebay for £2, less than a freetrade already degraded bio-recycled carbonized coffee and offers a much higher buzz that lasts a lifetime. Or so you would believe with all the evangelizing in the blogosphere.

What is Pownce? According to the very pretty powder blue and brown site: ‘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. You can do it all on our web site, or install our lightweight desktop software that lets you get out of the browser.’

So far so simple, so sweet (a term they are also fond of using). So it’s email yeah? But email that stalks you, hiding behind bushes waiting to pownce - nice image, clever marketing.

I’ve been using it for 2 minutes, I gave it 2 minutes of my time and I’m a little baffled, what’s all the fuss about, it’s kinda MySpace/IM/Email all rolled into one, but really doing none of the things those apps do well and it’s got some damn annoying features, like only showing you the first line of any message (I downloaded the app) so you have to click on the message to see the rest, also if you reply to a message it opens up another browser window - making the desktop app a little redundant with you having to chop and change between the two.

Big disclaimer, this is a 2 minute test, which the more I think about may make a nice and often damning regular feature.

What took up a comfortable 20 seconds of my 2 minutes was this table.

Genius, informative, the definition of a geek teletubbie, great to see them using Amazon S3 and AIR. Visually and technically it’s a feast, what you would expect from the founders, tech’s rock n’rollers. I’m just not sure what the point is and whether there is even supposed to be one… it’s like a way too attractive out of town cousin versus the plain Jane next door, one’s tempting and wrong, the other is familiar and will do just fine… I might give the cousin another look, but I won’t be propsing we go skinny dipping anytime soon.

First post, first metaphorical overload, beware the forthcoming split infinitives…

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