In the office, we are big fans of pownce. It’s our main tool to communicate, coordinate tasks and share knowledge to handle our web projects. It’s a great tool since we’re not always in the office and work at different hours.
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.
After a few days using it, FriendFeed is becoming a great tool for me. Following pictures, links, facebook status and other stuff in a single feed makes a lot of sense. I’m also looking forward for the AIR app.
