Social Networks for Short Attention Spans? - Pownce…and Pulse
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Pownce went live in late July. It is the latest baby of Kevin Rose, the man behind Digg. The big difference between Twitter and Pownce is that Pownce allows its users to share files. Another important difference between the two services is that Pownce can only be tried by those with an invitation. So you have to wait for an invitation from a friend, or request an invitation through Pownce’s home page.
Stan Schroeder, a self-confessed IM junkie, noted that Pownce’s killer feature is the way you can divvy up your friends and decide who receives information. “Send files to one person, everyone, or a group of people – we’ve been waiting for this feature for all our online lives,” he says in a review for Mashable. In addition to this flexibility, Pownce has other great features: themes to liven up your profile, good filtering options for your messages, and a desktop-based version of the application.
In a New York Times article about Pownce, Jason Pontin noted that the service might raise the hackles of media companies. Because users can carefully calibrate the people to whom they send files – including copyrighted files such as songs and film clips – “File sharing on Pownce would be difficult to police,” according to Pontin.
If so, then media companies have a lot to worry about, because Pownce is hardly the only company offering this kind of service. Not long after Pownce came on the scene, Plaxo began offering Pulse. Up until early August, Plaxo was a simple address and calendar organizer site with several million users. Now Plaxo’s users can share more than just address information.
One reviewer described Pulse as “one part microblogging platform and one part RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader.” It doesn’t quite work the same way as Pownce, in that you can’t directly share (send) files or event invitations. You have a set of friends, and based on what they publish online and how they choose to share it, their new activity shows up in the Pulse tab of your Plaxo account. Plaxo users that want to share their online activity with their friends need to tell the company where they are posting and how they want to share their posts.
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