Not Pouncing on Pownce
Kevin Rose announced yesterday his new venture. It's called Pownce, and is an application for sending files, photos, and messages to others. It is built on the Adobe AIR platform, so it can be used either as a web app, or downloaded and run from the desktop. Kevin's two previous endeavours have been quite successful. Digg has recently surpassed Facebook in daily visitors, which given Facebook's success shows just how popular the social news site is. His other business is Revision3, which does online media. It is just like a television channel, but with on-demand, online service. The most popular show on it is, expected, Diggnation.
This new undertaking, though, is a bit different than his previous things. The space he's entering is already fairly crowded. Also, it doesn't seem to provide anything that is terribly different than what you can do with other services. It seems to be a combination of email and Twitter, almost. I'm not really sure why you would use this instead of just shooting people an email. Here's one example they give of how you could use the service.
Hmm, sounds an awful lot like email to me. If I want to send a message to multiple people, there are countless services already for this. I can do it on Facebook. I can IM them. I can email them. Why should I use this new service? On top of that, they will all need to be on this service too. So now I have to convince them all to sign up for yet another thing.
The other thing is that this is an ad supported service, which you can pay to upgrade. Once again, where's the benefit here? Why do I want to use something with ads when I can get the same functionality out of other things without them?
Given the amount of Digg fanboys, I'm guessing that this service will at least get a good amount of buzz, and probably a few die hard fans. However, I personally don't see how this is going to set itself apart from other services out there, and why I should use it instead of something I already have.
This new undertaking, though, is a bit different than his previous things. The space he's entering is already fairly crowded. Also, it doesn't seem to provide anything that is terribly different than what you can do with other services. It seems to be a combination of email and Twitter, almost. I'm not really sure why you would use this instead of just shooting people an email. Here's one example they give of how you could use the service.
You might send an event out to a dozen of your friends letting them know you're
hosting a party this Friday. They could easily get the event details you
entered, respond with questions or comments and then quickly rsvp.
Hmm, sounds an awful lot like email to me. If I want to send a message to multiple people, there are countless services already for this. I can do it on Facebook. I can IM them. I can email them. Why should I use this new service? On top of that, they will all need to be on this service too. So now I have to convince them all to sign up for yet another thing.
The other thing is that this is an ad supported service, which you can pay to upgrade. Once again, where's the benefit here? Why do I want to use something with ads when I can get the same functionality out of other things without them?
Given the amount of Digg fanboys, I'm guessing that this service will at least get a good amount of buzz, and probably a few die hard fans. However, I personally don't see how this is going to set itself apart from other services out there, and why I should use it instead of something I already have.
posted by Jeremy at
8:32 AM
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