We had tried several tools: email-lists, Basecamp, Google Docs and a Wiki. They’re good, but we were always lacking something. Then twitter appeared on scene, and our way to communicate changed.

Since Twitter was the first tool in the market, everybody in the office started using it with a big group of contacts. It’s still a great tool and we’re always using it, but it’s not the tool for corporate usage. So we needed to try other choices being available Jaiku, Pownce and even the Prologue template for WordPress.

Pownce has been the best so far.

Good things about Pownce:

• You can arrange groups in Pownce in order to communicate in private to only certain contacts. We’re handling conversations between 4 recipients.
• Sending files (mostly screenshots that were sent trough email messages before) it’s a great add-on. We also send a lot of links since the tool provides a way to distinguish them.
• Every message has it’s own reply option so you can follow a single conversation. The only trouble with this is that this ends up in a two-persons conversation.
• Pownce has its own Adobe Air client for your desktop so there aren’t any API limits, what causes some problems for example in third party clients of twitter.
• Pownce doesn’t have so many users, so we haven’t experience troubles with the service so far.
• You can filter messages from private ones, public ones and also group messages, so it’s easy to navigate trough the information.
• The mobile version is clean and easy to use. We tested it on a Nokia phone and in the iPhone.

Points where we would like to see some improvement

• We need to search. How about a built-in search engine? This is mostly for the private messages, or even a way to send all this information to our email account where gmail will take care of the searching.
• Replies in Pownce are good, but you need them to be viewed by all the group members.
• Also, @user_narme should be identified as direct replies, the way twitter is working.
• How about marking messages as favorites? We have stars to rate messages, but then, you can’t filter them by votes. Having tags or any other way to mark messages will be also a great feature.
• When you share an image trough Pownce, you get a preview of it in the website, but this feature is not working in the AIR client.
• Email notifications work in a way that we still don’t understand. Some of the messages are missing and you don’t get the group conversations, just direct messages. We would like to get an email for every message with the contents.
• Feeds from conversations will be a great addition to the service, and better yet if they are private feeds with a key to save the info in our feed reader

Pownce offers a Pro account that will get rid of the advertising (there’s only some basic adds in the client and in the website). They also offer more capacity to send files. But just with the free service we’re more than fine.

With some of the features of searching, private feeds and more email tools, that pro account will be more valuable. And they could also think about a corporate pro account or something.

There are some posts comparing twitter with other tools, which ends up with bad comments to other players. But they’re different and that’s what we needed. So far, Pownce is the most corporate oriented tool and that’s a great market with a clear business model. Since we became good fans, we’re waiting for improvements and a true Pro account.

Eventually I’ll do more traveling this year, you all know me, I can’t stay in the same place for long time. I’d love to spend some time in the Valley this year and also visit Asia for the first time. We’ll see how that goes.

Among the projects we’re currently working on in Maestros del Web, the one I think is interesting to mention is Foros del Web. We’ve been getting more stats from our users so we can work with different companies to find talented developers and help them to outsource projects.

We are also finishing some minor details with Hostigg Spanish, our project devoted to webhosting offers that is helping me to do a lot of research in the different companies all over Latinamerica and Spain. Thanks to this, I am spending also more time updating our Company index. Some networking behind the screen is good for a change, after attending a lot of events in Europe last year.

Also, I’m working on a new section of Maestros del Web. Explorando, which is a personal collection of the cool readings and findings that I get almost daily trough feeds, del.icio.us recommendations and twitter links. Some days I’ll do also collections to special events like the CES event in Vegas or Innocents day on past december. If you find them interesting just grab the RSS to your reader and keep sharing those good things that you find.

And finally, I have to write more and more in english if I really want to practice. And also update this blog design, but it is hard to decide what to change. Thanks for reading ;)

I’m heading to Paris on tuesday.. that means that my twitter, tumblr and flickr account will be on fire.

The biggest internet event in Europe, more than two thousand participants, many entrepreneurs and great speakers…the perfect atmosphere to get inspired!

Update: My review of LeWeb 3 (in Spanish)

So I’m glad to hear that Javier just released Loogic English, were you’ll find some of the main articles of Loogic translated into english.

This is a great step for our market and I hope that other great bloggers can follow this actions. I’d love to read in english some of the posts of Fayerwayer, Error500, Denken Uber, NegociosB, OjoInternet, Mangas Verdes, Ecuaderno, Enrique Dans and others.

A complete translation of the blog is not needed; but to translate the most important posts about new projects will definitely help the promotion of the Hispanic Internet Business.

Thanks to Emilio for the invitation and hope to meet more great people -more than 180 confirmed guests. The program seems very complete with a Keynote from Enrique Dans, a well known teacher and blogger here in Spain.

Update: The event has live streaming today from Citilab in Quicktime.

The program seems very promising, it includes a great diversity of workshops and conferences; the networking this weekend will be great.
I’m particularly interested in the conferences of Hernan Casciari (Orsai), Jose Luis Orihuela (eCuaderno) and Biz Stone (twitter).

WordPress users, check out a demo of a great plugin

By the way, this weekend I’ll also meet Jure Cuhalev from Slovenia. I first meet him in Web 2.0 expo in Berlin, were he introduced me to Zemanta. They’ve been working on a technology to analyze contents while you write. The main objective is being able to auto-complete your posts with pictures, tags, links and related links on the fly. Seriously, one of the best plugins I’ve seen for WordPress, and a great opportunity for develop it in spanish.

Jure will be in Sevilla during the weekend. He booked the flight to attend EBE, but the event registration was already closed -since the website is in Spanish he asked for my help, but it was to late-. He would love to meet other bloggers in town and share a demo, so let him know at Zemanta blog.

There were some familiar faces and good networking. The evening ended in Ciudad Comdal (my favorite Tapas place in Barna) were we started talking about some OpenSoftware projects, and the lack of marketing that the majority of projects have to achieve the mainstream.

It was a great discussion about the need of a team of marketing and business professionals to help the Open Source community. Since the Open(whatever) is fashionable this days, we ended up talking about OpenMarketing.

Imagine this team that will focus on asking the right questions to the developers of OpenSource projects. It is about making marketing mix plans and adding value to projects. The main concern is with the profitability for the team, but this marketing has to be Open and a learning excersice for developers. I am sure that the ones that help will get good promotion for their names -branding is as important as cash-. Surgeons and lawyers do complicated work pro bono, so lets share the Open Source culture to the marketing world.

Anyway, Jeremiah left some thoughts about the meeting in his blog and also some pics in flickr:barcelonabloggernov07.

The event will be held in the Palacio de Congresos in Madrid and there is a couple thousand confirmed attendees with speakers like Angel Maria, Carlos Blanco, Gonzalo Ruiz, o Rubén Calvo, Bernardo Hernández, Joshua Novick, Samuel Arenas, Eneko Knörr, Pep Sánchez, David Quirant, Miguel Orense and David Martin.

See you in Madrid!

Yes, learn to write down my thoughts and share stories, learn to think over and over my ideas, learn from the comments and reactions of my readers, and from now on, learn to write better in English.

I’m going to write more often in English than in Spanish in my personal blog. For some posts about Community building, technology and Internet stuff I will always share them in Maestros del Web (in Spanish for sure).

Don’t hesitate to correct if something is terribly written…

Ryan asked a lot of questions about our knowledge of the event and also the web application’s scene in the Spanish market. We talk about companies and entrepreneurs from Barcelona, Spain and I added a few thoughts about Latinamerica. The Idea of the meeting was to meet for networking and also to discuss about the ways to help developers to keep innovating with new products for the global market as well as the local one. Ryan was a tutor in the recent Seedcamp and has a lot of experience with their own companies.

At the end of the meeting, Ryan gave away a free pass to the FOWA event in London and Sergio Gago was the lucky guy.

After the meeting, we got some Tapas in the Born neighborhood. It was the first night of La Mercè, reason for all the fireworks and a crowded downtown, so even a great time to show around. I have to thank Ryan and the FOWA team for sponsoring the beers of the meeting.

I’ll attend FOWA in October, so together with Sergio, Francesc Esplugas and another guy (sorry that didn’t got the name), there are four guys from Barcelona heading that way. ¿Anybody else comming?

Pictures from the meeting in flickr:fowaroadtripbarcelona.