Now Powncing

Inspired by all the twits about pownce I submitted my email addy too. What a useless procedure. From inside there's no list of submitted email addresses to pick friends from. Or I'm too blind to find that page.

Probably the best procedure to get rid of the 6 invites is to sell them at eBay. Perhaps Pownce releases 6 new invites then and I get rich quick. Wait ... I've a better idea. Submit your honest review of this blog in the comments and send me the email addy for your invite. If your piece is funny or honest or vilifying enough to make me laugh I might invite you ;)

Ok, so what separates Pounce from Twitter and WS_FTP? Here are my first impressions.

Unfortunately, I will not see the ads, never. Hectic clicking on all links signed me up as a pro-member by accident. Now Pownce blemishes my cute red crab with a "pro" label. I guess I got what I paid for. Paid? Yep, that's the first difference, Pownce is not completely free. Spamming friends in 100 meg portions costs an annual fee of 20 bucks.

Next difference. There is no 140 bytes per message limit. Nice. And the "Send to" combo box is way more comfortable than the corresponding functionality at Twitter. I miss Twitter's "command line options" like "d username" and "@username". Sounds schizophrenic perhaps, but I'm just greedy.

I figured out how to follow someone without friending. Just add somebody as friend and (you don't need to) wait for the decline, this makes you a fan of other users. You get their messages but not the other way round. Twitter's "add as friend" and "follow user" is clearer I think.

Searching for the IM setup I learned there's none. Pownce expert John said I've to try the desktop thingy but it looks like AIM 1999, so I refuse the download and stick with the Web interface until Pownce interacts with GTalk. The personal pounce page has a refresh link at least, but no auto-refresh like Twitter.

There's no way to bookmark messages or threads yet, and the link to the particular messages is somewhat obfuscated. The "email a bug report" is a good replacement for a "beta" label. I guess I'll use it to tell Pownce that I hate their link manipulation applying rel-nofollow crap. I'll play with the other stuff later on, the daddy-cab is due at the kindergarden. Hopefully, when I return, there will be a Pownce badge available for this blog, I've plenty of white space left on my sidebar.

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Back, still no badge, but I realized that I forgot to mention the FTP similarities. And there is no need to complete this post, since I found Tamar's brilliant Twitter vs. Pownce article.


Update: How to post to Twitter and Pownce at the same time (a Twitterfeed work around, I didn't test this configuration)

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