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I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. I have been on Pownce for about a week now. I have tried to use it and understand why this is so ground breaking. It’s a nice looking site and all, but why would I want to join a website to send my friends info, friends that have to be members of that website too.
Aren’t we going backwards here? Wasn’t the whole point of breaking away from the AOLs of the world years ago so we could have options? Don’t we use feed readers now so we can view what we want from who we want when we want? We didn’t want to be tied down to one service. Now, we have to be tied down to 2 or 3 services just to get all our friends networked with us?
What happened to email? I have been getting by with outlook for years now. I have all my contacts (friends) there. I want to send a message to someone? I email them. I want to share a link? I email it. I want to send a file to someone? I email it. Never been a problem before. Too big for gmail? No problem, I use senduit.com. Why would I pay $20 for something I can do for free?
I have heard that inboxes are too full now to keep up with email. Well, stop reading 3 or 4 websites to see who’s eating what for lunch and you just might get your inbox cleaned out. Spam is not a problem as much as it once was, at least for me. I get over 1,500 work related emails a day and I have had the same email address since about 1996, so I get my share of spam, but I have a good spam defender in place and don’t have to worry much about it.
Besides outlook, I use gmail now more than ever outside of work. I use Plaxo to sync the two and I am good to go. I don’t need anything else. Don’t get me wrong, these services are neat and they have a purpose, but are they really the next big thing?
Twitter, I get
Twitter makes more sense to me. People complain it’s ugly etc, but I think the people behind Twitter must be interested in others using the API to build services. Twittergrams are an nice example. The fact that it has SMS capabilities is a huge plus. For example, I can use Twittter here at work to have my customers sign up and get specials twittered to them instantaneously. I like the idea of that, especially the fact that they don’t have to be staring at a website waiting for an update.
This is the only space where email loses out IMHO. Why? I send out over 8,000 emails a week to customers that have subscribed to receive the specials. Of those, I probably get over 1,000 that are blocked by spam filters, that I know of. With Twitter, they either follow me or not. No worries about weather or not the email got through. That never seems to be a problem on a personal level with my friends emails, they always get through to them, and their’s always get through to me.
So why the difference? Simple. Twitter is a platform for others to build on, Pownce wants to be a destination. I’m not interested in a destination. I have enough to do already. I want a platform I can build applications to use. And if I want to tell my friends something, I’ll email them, or better yet, pick up a phone.