Pownce is the newest site from Kevin Rose. Normally I’m behind everything Kevin does because he’s a geek like me. We share that common dork wavelength. But I’ve encountered a number of things that bug me about Pownce already.
First of all is the whole AIR thing. I don’t want to download AIR. Can’t Flash already run on the desktop outside of the browser? I remember E-cards from Streetwise working like that back in the day. What I’m really saying is AIR is too new and doesn’t yet have that killer application that makes me want to download it. Sorry Pownce.
Some other Web 2.0 shoe-ins are missing as well. Where’s my RSS feeds? I should at least be able to subscribe to a feed of all the notifications that come in. I’m also a little puzzled why Daniel Burka didn’t take the 30 seconds it’d take him to create a favicon. They are such an important branding tool. I guess they must all be Safari users.
It annoys me that there is a premium paid service. While it’s certainly within his right to charge for a premium service, something about it feels dirty. I’ve always thought of Kevin as a dork first and a businessman later. Digg Pro accounts coming soon?
In the grand scheme of things, Pownce is just Twitter (but without the heavy focus on mobiles) or Jaiku (without the feed aggregation). Surely these are features that could be added, but it always looks better to be the innovator. This seems to be what the Pownce team is aiming for with their 10MB (100MB for paid users) file sharing and events services. It will be interesting if to see if Pownce is nearly as successful as Digg. The news market was a crowded place when Digg came on the scene and social IM is looking more and more crowded every day.
Update: Thanks to a Digg story, I was able to get an RSS feed of my public posts on Pownce. Now you can find my pownces(?) in Jaiku.
