Jan

21

Pownce Coming Out to Party

January 21, 2008 |

Pownce, a Twitter-like web app and the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, will be coming out of beta tonight.

They also added a few new features, most importantly, an easy way to import friends from other services like Digg and Twitter:

Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new version allows users to import friend lists from any/all of Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. More services will be added regularly, Culver says.

If Pownce has one secret weapon, its the easy ability to import your Twitter contacts (thanks to Twitter’s APIs), but otherwise, no matter what its developers say, it is pretty much a Twitter clone.

Mathew Ingram say Pownce and Twitter should merge. He might have a point. Pownce is a bit late to the party and everybody and their dog is already using twitter, which doesn’t allow for file transfers like Pownce does, but otherwise is a very similar service. I actually never missed the ability to transfer files in Twitter - that’s what I use email for anyway. Mathew says that the two should merge and that he is reconsidering using Pownce.

As for myself. I don’t see much use in Pownce right now (and, as MG Siegler points out, not too many people use it right now anyway). Unless everybody suddenly switches over from Twitter the services decided to work with each other, I am sticking with Twitter.

By the way, it seems like there are more and more Web 2.0 services that could benefit so much from not just having APIs but actually interacting with each other. All those messaging services, office suites, social networks would be so much more useful if they were based on a common protocol and interacted with each other. Instead, the oh so open Web 2.0 movement seems to be breeding more closed of silos than ever before.


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