Twitter out, Pownce in

I have to admit, I still don’t really get Twitter. It seems like it is 99% garbage. Twitter is based on the ques­tion, “What are you doing?” and in most cases, peo­ple are doing rather noth­ing inter­est­ing. I know I cer­tainly am not. Others use it almost as a web based IM client, which I just don’t get when IM works bet­ter. On the other hand, I am start­ing to warm up to Pownce.

Yes, some peo­ple use Twitter to answer a dif­fer­ent ques­tion. Merlin Mann, of 43folders is a good exam­ple of this. His twit­ter­ing is worth fol­low­ing most of the time (some­times he does just answer the ques­tion what are you doing just to throw us). I think the limit of 140 char­ac­ters suits him well. He is a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor on MacBreak Weekly as well and I find many times the best part of the net­cast. I found sev­eral oth­ers that are good to fol­low but bleh, most are not.

So reduc­ing Twitter to a maybe I will look, I decided I needed to still keep involved in some­thing like it. Pownce seemed to me to be Twitter on steroids — it still has the sim­ple text mes­sages but it has a lot more includ­ing the abil­ity to post pictures/files, links, and up-coming events. It was devel­oped by the fine folks at Revision3. It also has a cou­ple dif­fer­ent nice Adobe Air based clients that makes it easy to see posts as well as cre­ate posts. I nor­mally have one run­ning some­where, on one of my desktops.

Now, it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily have the easy SMS inter­face Twitter does, not that I ever used it for Twitter. I am a cranky old geek that has never like SMS, espe­cially when they cost to use. On the other hand, Pownce does have a moble web page for send­ing stuff from your smart­phone. With my iPhone, the web page inter­face works fine, mobile or normal.

I cur­rently fol­low pri­mar­ily those that post pho­tos as I am try­ing to train my brain to see good photo com­po­si­tion. This is what I see as a strength of Pownce. It encour­ages cre­ativ­ity and not the inane blath­er­ing that Twitter does.

I can also see it becom­ing a tool for small busi­nesses with its event post­ing and file shar­ing. I think it would be inter­est­ing for exam­ple for the pas­tor of our church to use Pownce to post quick info, event shar­ing, or “daily bread” type things. I could also see it as a way to spread prayer requests quickly through a prayer vine — hehe, I can just imag­ine Kevin Rose pulling his hair out if he ever read this going… “NOOOOO! I didn’t cre­ate Pownce to be a reli­gious tool, it was to share my cur­rent favorite beer!”

Tools like Pownce and Twitter are cer­tainly becom­ing mech­a­nisms to pro­vide sup­port. A quick note say­ing, “I can’t fig­ure this out” seems to result in sev­eral great solu­tions. I see Pownce as a bet­ter tool than Twitter to do so. Right now, most of this sup­port is infor­mal, almost acci­den­tal but I wouldn’t be sur­prised if some­one isn’t already using it as a pri­mary method to pro­vide some sort of sup­port.   My brain is start­ing to itch — bet­ter stop now before it comes up with a good idea.

My Pownce name is were­veal (of course, as is my Twitter account) but I doubt I will post much there until I have some­thing to share in that for­mat. I will pri­mar­ily be a “fol­lower.” If I find that I am using it more — get­ting a lot of friends etc, the Pro ver­sion could be appeal­ing. At $20 a year, it is not expen­sive and fits the “ben­e­fits” of being a “Pro.”