Poncing about

Yesterday I dropped two social networking sites from my collection. In a “everything happens for a reason” way I received an invite to Pownce this morning, which I accepted without really thinking about it.

A minor digression – I get that you can’t launch a new brand these days without savaging the English language, and I also get that they’re trying to do a play on the word pounce but no matter how hard I try I keep reading and pronouncing it as ‘ponce’ which is:

A British slang term for a dandy, fop or pimp

...which, for me, ruins the branding.

First impressions matter. In the few hours I’ve been registered Ponce Pownce has been down more than it has been up – or at least every time I’ve tried to access it. I managed to get registered and add the one person I knew who used it, but that is it.

...which for me, ruins the experience.

Seeing as I couldn’t actually use it, and I didn’t really understand (I did say I accepted the invite without thinking) what problem they were trying to solve – apart from taking on Twitter – I started doing some research. Tony Hung has summarised my findings quite succinctly, which reminded me of why I signed up for Twitter in the first place – being able to, er, twitter from my phone or IM.

This, to me, is far more valuable than the prettiest site design in the world. Until Ponce Pownce (or Jaiku) offer both these methods then they’re lagging behind. Sure it would be great if Twitter had sets, and being able to add events and files to Pownce is a nice feature (although events are better served by something like upcoming or meetup). Of these, sets is the only killer feature over Twitter and that’s ruined by being forced to use the website (or their ‘desktop’ client which I can’t use since Adobe’s interpretation of cross platform is as bad as Microsoft’s).