Home Based Business

04 Jul

Pownce Pros and Cons

A couple of days now into my experiment with Pownce.

A couple of months ago I started experimenting with Twitter and have dipped in and out of Twitter in a desultory fashion since.

I’m finding the messaging on Pownce more interesting than on

Twitter. On the other hand, the bombardment of my inbox with Pownce email notifications of

messages posted has been very annoying: fortunately, one of my friends on Pownce

pointed me to the settings where I can turn that feature

off.

I’m tending to err on the side of openness in

terms of accepting the various Pownce “friend me” requests.

Around the blogs, lines are being drawn on whether Pownce is or is

not A Good Thing.

On his Frantic Industries blog, Stan Schroeder comes out punching for Pownce. In

Pownce,

the Twitter Killer, he declares the new service to be “a new

Twitter - only better”.

And in his post on Mashable, Pownce: Against All Odd, Pownce Blew Us Away, he singles out the main feature he admires:

…on Pownce, you can send a message, or a file, or a song, or an

event, to one person; or three of your friends; or only your family; or

everyone. That’s right, you can engage in private conversations, you can speak

to the world, you can have a group of close friends, and a group of associates,

and a group of unknown people you just added to your profile, and you can choose

when you want to send stuff to any of these groups. With this simple feature

Pownce trounces all over Twitter, and comes close to being more useful than most

IM clients.

Mack D. Male disagrees strongly - see his post “Pownce

sucks“:

Honestly, Pownce is a horrible attempt to aggregate the functionality of a

bunch of services into one place. Twitter is better for messaging (heck so is

IM). Email/IM is better for sending files to individuals, services like box.net

do multiple people. Facebook is better for creating a network of friends, and

for creating and sharing events. del.icio.us is better for sharing links.

Neither Twitter nor

Pownce is something I feel any need to recommend at this point to business people. And maybe we need a bit more argy-bargy and feedback from a wider array of users before we can get an idea of how useful or otherwise either Twitter or Pownce can be in a business context.

For social networking and online identity

services that can be useful now for growing a business, I’m more

interested in services like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Still, I can’t say I’m not having fun experimenting

with a few of these new toys .