What’s Wrong With Pownce.com

Traffic for Pownce.com has dramatically dropped since July of this year (here). The reasons are many but they can be summarized in three areas; a lot fewer users, lack of focus to the user and quality problems.

Let’s face it Pownce is not as intuitive as Twitter probably because there are so many features in Pownce. For instance, Pownce not only provides Twitter-like features but it also allows users to send photos, music, videos, etc. For many users the plethora of features simply gets in their way of what they most want to do…follow their friends.

Twitter, on other hand, basically does just one thing and one thing well, allow users to follow others in a simple text mode.

This whole issue of too many features is complicated by two other problems…the quality of the application and no one to follow.  In an article written by Chad Everett on June 4, 2008, entitled “A Brief Look at Plurk, Pownce and Twitter” (here), Everett notes that Pownce’s quality is actually worse than Twitter’s. He shows how Pownce has tried to hook into Twitter to increase the size of the audience but he rightly notes that if you want to do that, why not just go to Twitter? He, then, raises the question, “Do I want to go through all the trouble of dealing with a buggy application and then have no one follow?”

If Pownce continue with the above, it may not be around next year.

Update:  TechCrunch just report this “Pownce Deadpooled, Team Moves To Six Apart” (here)

Tagged as: in trouble, Twitter