Daniel Burka, co-founder and head designer for Pownce, has generated some buzz by posting a screenshot teaser of an upcoming release (shown above).
From what we can see in the shot – a search box, an upload link, and parts of the words “Artist” and “Playlist” – it appears to be some sort of browser-based music player.
Just a couple days ago Pownce started allowing users to post files to the general public, not just their Pownce friends. The micro-blogging format, however, only allows one file to be posted at a time, although these individual files can be played back in a simple Flash player.
This new player might allow users to upload batches of audio files and share them with friends as mixtapes, which would put the service in competition with sites like Muxtape, Mixwit, Mixaloo, and Imeem.
Seen more broadly and in light of recent lifts in file size limits, this could be a sign that Pownce is trying to differentiate itself from Twitter by heading further in the file sharing direction, as suggested by Duncan Riley just the other day. It seems as though Pownce’s already-vague “send stuff to your friends” tagline isn’t broad enough after all.
Thanks Ryan for the tip.
We allow you to post all your mp3 collection, and we allow you to embed mp3s and playlists.
No storage limits, totally free
http://www.mybloop.com
You can actually use it for work too. Not micro-time-wasting
I think there is a bias here: some would like those features so they take anything as a hint.
For what matters, it could be the “Wishlist 1″, containing several “Articles”…
My guess is that the empty yellow bar is where track information will show up, a la iTunes. If they stick to the iTunes design, the control buttons would be off to the left.
Tumblr actually has something pretty similar, and this would be an interesting tactic for pownce.
To see Tumblr’s (very alpha) feature called “Sound Box” goto the dashboard and type listen on your keyboard. The dashboard will move down by about 60 pixels and you’ll see a link to “launch the sound box”
Although I agree with Adrien, while it is likely Pownce will head in that direction there is nothing conclusive about that screenshot.
The Pownce founders have spent the last 2 weeks announcing their newest Muxtapes on Twitter. Might they have a deal to work with Muxtape directly? I doubt they’d work so hard promoting a site they intend to conquor.
ryanmerket.muxtape.com
that’s all i got.
Wonderful as Muxtape is, it is also completely illegal and will probably fade away once it becomes too popular. Th founders seem to be making some money through Amazon referrals (in addition to coming into posession of huge library of music) but I think it would be very hard to continue this for long.
@Adrien – interesting counter theory, but why would you have articles in a wishlist?
I wish Pownce would fix its spam issue first. I get a whole lot of invites now from ‘HomeBased Business’, etc.
@Mark: I got mixed up. In french, “article” can be used to define a product or an item. Anyway, after looking deeper into it, it seems the ending is “ylist”, so my theory doesn’t stand anymore.
Feeds and messages are a great way to discover and share music. The key is to optimize them to make them relevant. If we take twittering of music further, radio stations can be built in real-time by a bunch of people posting songs, and filtering should build the stream that you might like the most. We are building TWIT.FM with that focus.
@tyler: Thanks for this “easter egg” tip!! I follow Tuneage on tumblr and this serves as a great tool to access those hidden gems.
During the height of twitter’s down-time, I was hoping there would be a mass jump to Pownce. That didn’t happen and, in my opinion, the service has languished. The pending music/media player could be a useful, fun development for Pownce, but unless everyone leaps over there, or we can truly port our profile data in and out of it and other services, I’m not sure this is the remedy for Pownce.
Certainly there are others who feel Pownce isn’t even ill.
The funny thing is, when pownce originally launched its client I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the original imeem social IM and filesharing client, which had of course failed abysmally leading imeem to it’s current ‘youtube for music’ incarnation.
So, is pownce taking another step in its evolution from imeem’s history?
I hope muxtape causes a new trend in web design. It should.
How are these services avoiding legal trouble? I know imeem has an arrangement with the record companies but what about the others?
none of them have licenses with all the labels, but if you want to be popular you need music from big record labels, and if you want big record labels to talk to you then you have to grab their attention. So letting millions of users share their music illegally generally works for grabbing attention, then you have to convince them that they can make a deal and that you can pay for it.
So muxtape as we know it is doomed, it’s wonderfully simple design is nice but that doesn’t have any room for monetization – don’t believe justin’s story about amazon affiliates, imeem makes plenty of money from affiliate income and it still needs advertising. To go legal muxtape will have to add filtering so that you can’t upload beatles tracks. No doubt Sony will attempt to push Gracenote’s identification technology on them.
Mybloop is a new entrant, looks like a more general file store, but having all those different rules for music won’t help its legal standing at all. If they get popular then the record business will ask for changes, and vast sums of money.
Just watch what happens to projectplaylist over the next few months. Or better still look at how imeem changed in the last year, I’m sure that we’ll see this happen again and again.
Wonderful as Muxtape is, it is also completely illegal and will probably fade away once it becomes too popular.
Pownce == Fail
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
Pownce has always been a service that I’ve just never really had the incentive to start using regularly. Maybe this will stir up some interest again.
Look forward to what they develop.
Maybe this will pursued Muxtape to release a search option! (and recognize the download Greasemonkey scripts)