Have you Pownced?

catherine — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:12:27 -0500

I confess I did... but after some weeks, I still haven't become a regular user.

I was prompted to signed up to Pownce when colleagues and friends did, but I've not yet reached that critical point where visiting the site becomes a natural part of my daily informational round. I don't need to transact large files all that much, because I mostly link to them on the web, and I already have preferred means of communicating with colleagues. So what's to like?

The major affordance of Pownce, to my thinking, is as a microblog or alternative to threaded email conversation. For initial posters (people who want to start an interaction / discussion), in terms of interface design, Pownce is slightly "easier" than a blog, because it's lower-bar. Like Twitter, the Pownce interface encourages reasonably short, minimal posts or "updates". For people replying to a "thread", it's easy as replying to a blog post - again, the interface encourages brevity. I know, I know, "thread" is a slightly misleading term to use here, because the Pownce design encourages a "flat" representation of communications, rather than a "hierarchical" one -- though it's still linear, top to bottom, which I suppose is a hierarchy of sorts. And there is that social networking aspect again, the sense of community, created through having little representations of individuals directly attached to "posts". A group of individuals engaging in "discussion" in Pownce is basically like a group of Facebook friends commenting on someone's Wall... if that appeals, you might like to check it out. It's prettily designed.

EDUCAUSE | Internet and Web Applications

Have you Pownced?