The Kevin Rose/ Leah Culver Twitter meets file sharing network Pownce has finally launched a public API, 3 months after first announcing that an API was coming.
Pownce launched in late June to a surge of interest based around the involvment of the ever-popular Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3), however the popularity has not lasted. Both Compete and Alexa show big drops in traffic from Pownce as users have abandoned the platform, Alexa showing a remarkable 80% drop in traffic. The Pownce AIR client was buggy at launch and the lack of an open API has meant that whilst Twitter continues to grow with the assistance of an ever increasing range of third party apps, Pownce has actually gone backwards.
Culver and Rose will be hoping that the interest in Pownce hasn’t declined to a state where 3rd party developers will not be interested in building for Pownce: it’s really the only thing the platform might have left to arrest its continued slide of user interest.
GREAT News -Congrats Kevin!
Can someone help me out here….I’ve been on Pownce for a while and haven’t quite figured out where it fits in to my routine of regular app usage…
http://alisaleo.../10/pownce.html
It’s just one option for socializing online. You don’t HAVE to use it, however, for me, I find it works great to separate your real life friends and online contacts
“Better Late Than Never”
Pownce just lauched a couple months ago?
How is this late? BTW, I am a big Kevin Rose supporter.
How did Pownce.com get PR7 in just four months? Maybe Google should be shutting them down instead of those sites whose owners have been working hard on building something useful and worthy.
i am ‘hopping’ duncan learns to proofread.
“send stuff to your friends”
even the logo tells that this is a half-hearted effort at best.
Wow… everything is opening up.
And in response to Mark about how Pownce is doing better than Jaiku, wow. And that brings up the interesting point that Google’s been acquiring the underdog – first with Dodgeball, then with Jaiku.
Duncan, do you think that 3rd party development for Pownce will catch up?
I would like to hear your opinion, but it seems to me that this clichéd move won’t help ailing network.
I do hope the apps start flowing in. Pownce is really the better than twitter and jaiku in terms of features e.g. their event system, ability to share files and embed youtube videos. Someone needs to come up with a twitter, jaiku, pownce mashup. Maybe twitku can add pownce support and hellotxt can add comment visualization (instead of just sending comments).
About 70% of my Twitter feed is people sharing TinyURLs, so in theory Pownce should be able to cover that market better. It’s actually a pretty neat system to use – the thing is, Twitter has the userbase and was first to market. It’s very difficult to compete with that.
Here is a free application (mac,win) that lets you upload your files to adobe SHARE(1 gig free storage) and then send the link with a message to Pownce or Twitter.
http://initApp....by-adobe-share/
I think that Pownce missed the boat. if you look outside the geek community its not really being used much. Compare its numbers to some other apps and you’ll see that Pownce really needs some work.
This will be integrated into SpinVox’s social networking application:
http://www.face...p?id=5328792042
This is actually rather interesting, what if there were a merger between current status software (Twitter) with the ability for users to send any file anytime they wish? I wish Pownce the best of luck and I highly recommend that they yuse Facebook apps, iPhone apps as well as other sections for distributing their main software to third party sites. Software is the ultimate form of viral content once it may be connected to high-traffic sites…
I think the mistake some people make is expecting from Pownce what they expect from Twitter/Jaiku *right now*, despite Pownce having only just entered the market.
Truth is, it’s a sweet system, offering more than either Twitter and Jaiku, and does have interest from the dev market (if the crowd listening to Leah Culver at FoWA was any indication).
If they really want to kick ass, find some way of (uniquely) integrating it into Digg.
Why would any one care to use pownce when you have apps like yahoo messenger
and AIM. -
Kevin Rose!
let’s just move on people!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Nice!, now it’s time to wait a few time to see the apps using this API.
We were one of the sites that built an integration using the unofficial API some weeks back. So far the uptake has been strong.
For me, pownce isn’t twitter/jaiku, it isn’t IM, it isn’t IRC….its something in between.