I've been avoiding Pownce since hearing about it on Diggnation a while back. A whole heap of invites have been sent to me but I've resisted till I got one from Sheila. I started writing reasons why not to use Pownce but then changed my mind about writing a rant back and decided to actually try it out first before blasting it.
So you can see from the title I think Pownce is basically a combination of twitter/jaiku, delicious and im. This is no bad thing but… what I think is bad is the closed network aspect of it all. This all leads back to a comment I got back from Regular Jen about Facebook.
Also good to hear that Facebook won't become the main 'hangout' for Geek Dinners, as I know I won't be dipping my toes in their shark-infested site again. I still am not clear on why a Facebook Geek Dinners group is necessary, but I hope you find it useful and wish you the best.
And you know what shes right. I forgotten why I use to hate these non media social networks. Closed networks. I signed up to facebook because they started to open up with a 3rd party API and the sheer pressure from friends. Pownce on the other hand has none of these and yes its early days, I can't get over the simple combination which to me has no benefit except speed and convince over the larger combination. Yes it has a public timeline like twitter so you can tune into someone elses public recommendations but for f-sake delicious has had this ability for years. For example I send links to some delicous friends using the syntax or machine-tag for:username. Once you've done that you can link to anything including binary objects. Some would say the problem is that anything you recommend appears in your own bookmarks. So what? Anything you recommend should be good enough to keep.If not then use email, im, twitter, jaiku, etc, etc. What about privicy? Or like Jen you want to opt out?
Anyway this is really about Pownce but social networks for the sake of social networking. Something I've forgotten…
And at that I'm unsubscribing from Pownce now.
updated
Is there no end to this madness?
Pownce Invites For Sale On eBay — Proving that everything has a market, invites to Kevin Rose's P2P service Pownce are up for sale on eBay. — Bidding on Pownce invites start at 1c with buy it now prices at $5. — It wasn't that long ago when Gmail invites were available for sale on eBay
meta-technorati-tags=pownce, delicious, twitter, jaiku, im, email, facebook, ebay