Tag: Pownce

The Pownce situation as a management case study

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

The Case Study

You are the lead developer of a small but promising web 2.0 startup. As the young, intelligent engineer with a specific plan for the mechanics of a new web site, you find that interest is flowing in from many of your colleagues in the technology world.

As a key partner in the project, you pick an established but young web 2.0 figure who is a key executive at a social bookmarking site as well as at a tech podcast company. Highly popular among the tech fans on his site and well-known in the industry, your business partner may be the closest thing these days to a “rock star” of web 2.0. Skeptics might say that he is not yet particularly well known outside the Silicon Valley–but then the same can be said for Twitter, Ajax, even for the term ‘web 2.0’. You surmise that his track record of previous success and ability to gain over a million users for his still-growing social bookmarking site ensure that he will offer sound judgment in running and promoting your business as well.

Since your goal involves launching a site with a code base that you have developed as a side project, you decide to move the product as fast as possible to an open beta–and then have an invitation only version launch that limits the number of new users that can join. Your marketing is based on your contacts in the tech industry and the buzz you have been able to create on the web, especially on tech blogs which happen to be obsessed with micro-blogs, social bookmarking, tumbelogs and short messaging services. Your site has elements of all of these, has a modern, Ajax-intensive design and uses a certain kind of Python framework.

After a round of frequently positive reviews for your site, your invite system soon goes to work and people start joining in large numbers. Although you face many competitive threats from similar sites which also allow users to exchange short messages, you offer the unique value-added feature of file sharing. Many of tech’s coolest people join in.

Rushing to the market has gotten your site has established, and now you are racing to add features. For now your pro accounts promise only to take away ads and increase your file upload size; some consumers are expecting more from a “pro” account. You just added the XFN standard for the social graph, and there’s no reason that your site won’t become an important part of it. For now, you lack an open API like many competitors but are working on it.

In the mean time, your “rock star” executive has been working on stuff, too–at his other sites. Browsing the new features on his “social bookmarking” site, the project with a million users that he had previously been involved with and was now splitting his time with, you notice that they have now blatantly stolen one of the key design elements of your site. When people sign up, they now see an incredibly similar form for a certain question that users on your site also see at your sign-up page. As a user and even previously a vociferous fan of this social bookmarking site, you know this feature that copied yours has just been added. What do you do?

Background

Well, in the case of Leah Culver and Pownce, here’s the story:

‘Pownce co-founder Leah Culver has made a post to Digg suggesting that she feels the new social networking features that the site added last week were copied from Pownce. In the posting, which links to a now deleted Flickr photo, Culver writes:

“Since I originally came up with the Pownce gender list, I’m somewhat miffed that Digg copied Pownce.”’

My first thought on this–maybe she’s trying to make a point exactly the way she did, or maybe she will decide to handle disputes at a different level. Either way, I hope it works out well for her and Pownce–I think it’s a good platform, what it needs is more users and more file sharing methods in my opinion, but at any rate I despaired of using Digg a few months ago whereas I use Pownce every week.

Pownce’s strengths:

–new features

–popular entrepreneurs backing it

–tech-savvy user base

Pownce’s weaknesses:

–no public API (for user-built apps)

–limited user base

–no widgets for use on other pages

Pownce’s Opportunities

–Build “best-in-class” reputation for file sharing with web 2.0 set the way Flickr has with photos–then get people to buy pro accounts

–Match advertisers with tech-savvy user base

–Add features one at a time to build lightweight but useful social networking product

Pownce’s Threats

–Close competitors: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Gmail

–Eventual bubble burst in web 2.0 inevitable

–Kevin Rose’s other sites stealing trade secrets from the inside

The lonely madness of the Twitter user

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

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New competitors like Yappd (which so far really isn’t much to speak of at all, by the way) and Pownce are moving fast on Twitter’s market.

After getting a new round of funding in the last month, however, Twitter has started going down again in the last day or two. Sometimes it will work through an app but not through the front page, sometimes nothing loads, it’s all very unpredictable. I am not very pleased about this, as I had started using the service again more.

For now, I’m this close to stopping. But I like Twitter–the bird logos are great for any aviary enthusiast such as myself and the name and constant short sharing of random thoughts, sometimes with people you know and often with others–these are custom designed for someone with my personality.

It could be said that Twitter is a time waster, but that’s not too serious a concern for anyone who could throw off 140 words of the top of his head easily and is using the 140 character text entry field that Twitter allows. It’s very convenient to post to Twitter, and messages have to be short, so normally all I would do would be just pop open a chat window in Gmail or open a widget in Netvibes, type in my quip, and go back to reading my email or checking my feeds.

Once the site stops working, though, the time wasting factor kicks in with a vengeance. I’m checking my profile page to see if it has my latest update. I’m wondering if my hordes of Gmail filters are failing to properly direct tweets from friends when the tweets just aren’t coming in by IM. I log into Facebook to see if tweets are being added to my mini-feed. I go to my web page and it loads slowly as the Twitter updates widget chokes.

None of this should really matter, but for a Twitter addict this can seem a maddening process. The economy of the Twitter message length–the text-messaging-friendly 140 character limit–also imbues those short messages with their own elevated importance in the fevered mind of the Twitter user.

I’ve been using Pownce and Jaiku a bit, and I like them fine, but instead of looking for a real replacement for Twitter I should reach back to my old posts and bring back the idea of being a Qwittr.

Pownce has some really nice features, but what it needs right away is a first-party blog widget and Facebook app, and customized home pages. (Maybe for the pro package at least? Might interest a lot more people.)

It doesn’t seem like many people use Jaiku as their main updates service anymore but it is able to accept RSS feeds from the user’s other sites and that feature seems to have become the key part of Jaiku’s formula–many people, for example, send their Twitter feed to Jaiku so people following them on either get the message, but on the Jaiku feed you might also see the user’s recent Last.fm listens and del.icio.us bookmarks or blog entries. The ongoing stream of the user’s content works much the way a tumbleblog does in practice for many–and an additional feature on Jaiku is the ability to comment and follow others.

Yappd I cannot say very good things about. I just heard about it and decided to try it, and have just found that it does not allow perma-links for individual notes. This is not a good feature, and its lack of widgets and overall Twitter-copy feel did not seem to cover much new territory. Maybe it will add some new features and take off but for now it’s definitely back in the pack.

Yappd doesn’t even allow their vaunted add-a-picture feature for web-based updates, only via email or SMS. Overall it doesn’t seem like a fully developed offering. The pictures are supposed to be their big differentiator, but then recently people like Dave Winer have started using Twitter as a “coral reef” for Flickr photos anyway, so not much at all makes Yappd stand out at the end of the day now. I’ve been looking at some of the debate about whether the market spewing out such lackluster lookalikes is a sign of a financial bubble in the web 2.0 space, and I personally still think it is.

But the latest tulip over-valuation has to come some time, cyclically speaking. The new social and economic phenomenon symbolized by Twitter, however, is generating much discussion on the future of media and telecommunications and gaining broader notice.

My take on all the talk about how shortening the message to 140 characters makes one concise is a very skeptical one, however. People who congratulate themselves for all their great writing just become more appreciative of each of their own words. Yes, in some ways Twitter seems to symbolize the isolation and narcissism that gnaws at the guts of so many titans of tech culture and their copious followers and wannabes.  And it symbolizes a backlash against blogging, yes, the same way tumbleblogging does–for many seem to be relieved of the pressure of producing so many words or managing that sidebar.  And it can symbolize the lonely challenge of the pioneer–many tech early adopters have jumped on Twitter but haven’t yet had many of their friends join in.

Those are all fascinating angles, but I think what Twitter symbolizes is the re-learning of basic PC tasks going on with the techie set because of the popularity of mobile devices from iPhones to Blackberries, Treos and other cell phones to PSPs. Twitter scales blogging back ten years, just as most of those devices take the user interface back about that long.

The file sharing feature is what could matter for Pownce

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

All sorts of reviews of Pownce, a new service that has been compared to Twitter and Jaiku, have delved into the technical arguments about the Adobe AIR client, and how doesn’t Gmail send 20MB files (to Pownce’s 10MB?), and what does a pro account get you, like no ads (what ads anyway?) and 100MB file sending instead, and usually a review can’t end without an assessment of the clausterphobic world of web2.0 personalites. So I can’t compete with that here but let me add my views on the service:

(1) The single most interesting thing about Pownce is the transparent but almost intangible similarity in feel to Flickr, not a coincidence as Yahoo’s photo service is the de rigeur photo site in the web 2.0 bubble (though still not quite the most popular compared to old Photobucket in what Bob Dylan called “America”). Well the similarity in “pro accounts” stands out of course, (I think $20 to Flickr’s $25–but don’t hold me to that I don’t have a pro account now in either service) but use the web site part of Pownce for a while and see if you don’t also sense a vague similarity in look and feel.

(2) Okay, I will wade a bit into the overall debate–Pownce really is sort of a tumbleblog, but it’s not bad but not amazing, at least so far, and could work a bit like Twitter for some peoeple, and some people could use it more like AOL IM, but it really needs to be able to accept incoming feeds (the way Jaiku or Tumblr can) and have external widgets to give updates from the service on your blog. Also they need to serve up a timeline of public updates. You have to click around to find interesting pages–navigation should be done from more angles. (For now, check lead developer Leah Culver’s page for updates about the service because some of these features or others may be added–it’s in invite-only beta right now and the Adobe AIR desktop client is still in alpha.)

(3) Key among the services mentioned is the file sharing feature. I don’t have to run through the history of P2P networks like Hotline, Napster, IRC, Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent here, but some of their varied histories show the vagaries of both popularity and legality of sharing files on certain networks. Pownce, on the other hand, is a new service that may offer a good deal of privacy because it works off a centralized network. Or it may not. But if it attracts a user base that makes frequent use of the file sharing feature (perhaps even files that are legal to share–if that’s even at all possible under the DMCA–I’m not a lawyer) Pownce could differentiate itself from current crop of both short messaging services and P2P networks.

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