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5 sure steps to a better Pownce
Thursday, 17 January 2008 — by Wayne Smallman
As a micro-blogging platform, Pownce is great. There’s a genuine sense of community in there, but Pownce isn’t without its blind spots, dark corners and empty chairs. In this house, there’s room for improvement!
Pownce is a Social Network
For those less familiar with what Pownce is, then I have just the article for you:
“Put simply, Pownce is a small or micro ‘blog that you share with people you add as your friends.
You get to post stuff like links, events, files (such as images, movies, music et cetera) and people can reply to those posts. They can even score your post, giving it a zero to five star rating.”
1. In search of the discussion
The obvious absentee is a search tool. Sometimes, you just need to find that photograph, that song, or that comment you made.
2. Pownce — the editors edition
As a developer, I’m familiar with the phrase: reads are cheap, but writes are very expensive. So that might be the reason the guys behind Pownce choose not to offer the ability to edit comments — because of the load such a feature would place upon their servers.
Also, there’s also the problem of revisionist historians changing a discussion part way through a heated debate, or whatever, which is an issue for forums.
So the ability to edit would come at some price. But looking at the discussions I’m a part of, I think it could only be a good thing.
3. Pownce as the social hub
Most people seem to add in their other Social Networks and Social Media hang-outs, so why not have Auto-Sets that gather people under these different websites?
Do this, and Pownce becomes a social hub, with people able to find friends in places they maybe never thought to look.
4. Refined friends
What about filter options (by region, by country et cetera)? Then we can find people by more refined criteria.
Strangely, I think Pownce is exempt from the need to offer some way of ranking friends. The reason being that Pownce is a very open-ended series of discussions, all of which are essentially open to you.
So it’s possible you’re missing a conversation in your country, or about your country, which you want to be a part of.
5. Pownce — the omnibus edition
Some people on Pownce have hundreds of friends. It’s hardly surprising that the odd comment we throw in there just vanishes into their Inbox!
So why not have an email omnibus? Just like Google Alerts, or thread updates in forums, we get to choose to have our messages sent to us in one email.
Over to you! Improving upon Pownce in leaps and bounds
So, if you’re on Pownce, first of all, feel free to add me, Wayne Smallman and Kate Carillo, too.
Secondly, what do you think Pownce needs to make it better for you?
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I think you hit it right on the head. I especially like the social hub idea. I don’t mind the none edit function. Since everyone knows that you can’t edit, it is taken as a grain of salt if you make mistakes. Plus people pay attention, so if you correct yourself down the line, it will be noticed easily.