Pownced and Twitterized

Over past few weeks I have been introduced to two new products in the Social Communication space, Pownce and Twitter. Some say that these are competing offerings, but I dont seem to think so. To summarize my thoughts on these:

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  • Pownce is a much improved and simplified way to talk to your friends or coworkers. On paper the features offered by this service do not differ from an Email client.
  • It however delivers a much nicer experience around messaging with a social feel to it.
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  • Twitter is a service which allows you to broadcast “What are you doing now…”.
  • It attempts on easily blogging quick, random and transient data about its users

Both these services offer some nice and unique features. I played with them for over past few weeks. I even tried integrating them with my blog to really derive the power of these services.

After these weeks, I am officially giving up on these features. Although nice these services by themselves aren’t much useful. I tried using Pownce with friends and co-workers and pretty much everyone lost interest after a week or so. With twitter I lost interest after realizing that it didnt add much value to what I was doing.

Frankly I think these could be valuable features within a Social Ecosystem like Facebook or MySpace. By themselves they do not offer much of a value. Users (especially the kids) spend lot more time on social networks and they would rather use such features there.

Such new services must realize that they dont have to be a destination always. They can be very successful within a pre-established social ecosystem. Twitter certainly has realized that and recently launched a Facebook app.

So finally I am going to de-activate my wordpress twitter plugin and make space for something more valuable.