Pownce Is Still Alive

Ted / 20.Dec.2007

Yeah, I know. It surprised me too, but they are still kicking. Stagnation is the name of the game in Web 2.0, and Pownce is no exception.

In case you forgot, Pownce is a Twitter clone whose added value is the resale of Amazon S3 space. It's written in Python (Django) by someone who rounds floating point numbers using strings, and is only noteworthy by virtue of being co-founded by Kevin Rose of Digg.

inotify Is Awesome. JNotify Is Fail.

Why is it that every time you retards do a JNI binding to some kernel API, you screw it up by making it enterprisey?

I wrote about Pownce in June, and that got a little bit of attention. I have a Pownce account, and to be honest, I hadn't logged into it since that last writeup. That is, until I opened it today. It's pretty much the same as I remember: you can't intuitively grasp the usefulness of the service by looking at the page.

It could be simply an effect of the design (Thanks be to Burka), but I have a better explanation. Could it be, just an off-chance, that Pownce is, in fact, useless? It's an untested theory, but this is a place for experimentation.

IN_DELETE and IN_DELETE_SELF Are Distinct Events. Don't | Them, Bro.

Anyhow, there isn't anything new to report about Pownce. They released an API a couple of months ago, but the time for that to be relevant had come and gone when it was announced.

There is one thing I think is worth bringing up, though. Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:

Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.
Arrington covers it, thousands of users signup. Mike takes his ad revenue.
People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.
Fail.

Seriously, you can look at virtually any Web 2.0 company and see a nearly-identical traffic graph. There are so many that look like this that a successful company can be considered a statistical anomaly.

Oh, and in before Persai. Fuck you, commenters.

add to del.icio.us, digg it, rabble reddit pownce

47 Comments

Persai!

persai / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:25pm

They are neck and neck with hampsterdance.com! Traffic-wise anyway. Revenue is no contest, the hamster has apparently sold a Chinese freighter-full of t-shirts, cd's, and coffee cups.

tricky dick / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:28pm

in after persai

afterpersai / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:29pm

Ok, Uncov. Take a look at this: www.HelpWorldClimate.com www.HelpWorldPoverty.com www.HelpWorldPeace.com www.HelpWorldWildlife.com All smartypants comments will be taken on board. :)

greg tallent / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:31pm

I never heard of Pownce until today, after being referred to this site from somewhere else. I read this on their site "Pownce is brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another." I think that now, I finally 'get' Web 2.0. It seems to be a bunch of useless arse, coded by people genuinely too stupid to figure out how to use email or IM (I doubt they've even heard of FTP), but who still have the temerity to call themselves geeks, and are sufficiently shameless about this to publish on THEIR OWN BLOGS evidence that the code behind their product looks like it was written by an autistic chimp. Is that about it then, or I am still so yesterday ?

the other steve / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:35pm

Ha ha! Love it. I actually got a Pownce invite and wondered when did Twitter add an invite function. Then I had to curl my lip when I remembered that Pownce is still a live and some douche still uses it to send invites.

oz / 20.Dec.2007 at 12:37pm

Floating point via strings! Only this generation of programmers (how the f*** did she get a CS degree) would not know how to do basic math. Her little "tee hee how do I do this" post is probably indicative of her academic career.

pointer / 20.Dec.2007 at 01:00pm

To: Ted From: someone who doesn't fail at maths Q.v. http://widgets.alexa.com/traffic/sparky/?url=pownce.com

pownce sparkline, crashing / 20.Dec.2007 at 01:05pm

"Oh, and in before Persai. Fuck you, commenters." Oh shi- Dynamic Entry!

donkey balls / 20.Dec.2007 at 01:09pm

This is... frightening. I knew some of these people were a little incompetent, but not on THIS scale. And they're all VC millionaires who go to trendy Silicon Valley parties. Bah.

robert synnott / 20.Dec.2007 at 02:19pm

wahh.. math is really hard! 'kin you do it for me? One of these days those idiots who continue to fix Leah Culver's shitty code on her blog will get their dicks out of their hands long enough to trick her in to implementing: <table cellspacing="0" border="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr><td width="150"><center>oooo <marquee behavior="alternate" direction="left" width="100%"> 3=========Ð</marquee> O</center></td> <td width="40"> <marquee behavior="scroll" direction="right" width="100%">~° ~° ~°</marquee> </td></tr></table>

shlepelicious / 20.Dec.2007 at 02:34pm

HOW DO I PERSAIL?!?!?!

anon / 20.Dec.2007 at 02:56pm

Pownce vs. Tumblr: GO!

in after wait wut / 20.Dec.2007 at 03:07pm

This says it all.

fuqtard / 20.Dec.2007 at 03:16pm

In after fucked commmenters.

nin-mofo / 20.Dec.2007 at 03:28pm

Dammit three "m's", and when in Vegas I never get three of anything.

nin-mofo / 20.Dec.2007 at 03:29pm

So you need an email address to sign up for Pownce. And Pownce lets you send files, messages, and pictures to your friends. WHICH I CAN ALREADY DO BECAUSE I HAVE AN EMAIL ADDRESS. Wow. There must be a better word than Fail.

johnnyd / 20.Dec.2007 at 03:39pm

@JohnnyD There's more than one word, and they are: "Internet--Serious Business".

nin-mofo / 20.Dec.2007 at 04:50pm

>>>This says it all. -- you son of a bitch! I was EATING when I hit that chart and saw the name of the third site listed. Thanks for the near-vomit, turd-breath.

mike cane / 20.Dec.2007 at 05:15pm

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/persai.com+uncov.com+pownce.com/?metric=uv

pointer / 20.Dec.2007 at 05:24pm

Whoever compared Pownce to Two Girls, One Cup is a fucking genius.

aaronontheweb / 20.Dec.2007 at 05:32pm

actually you just made arrington sound pretty damned smart

mike not arrington / 20.Dec.2007 at 05:49pm

"you can't intuitively grasp the usefulness of the service by looking at the page. It could be simply an effect of the design...". There is a big, centered column. There is a giant textbox with message-link-file-event at the very top. There are a series of aforementioned messages-links-files-events. If you can't grasp what's going on, you have the intuition of Terri Schiavo.

danny trinh / 20.Dec.2007 at 11:07pm

You guys are freakin funny. Where in ct are you from? Southern or Central.

john furrier / 20.Dec.2007 at 11:08pm

@john furrier: fuckin all those fools who come here from CT are from Wilton or some other millionaire hippy commune in County Fairfield.

shlepelish / 20.Dec.2007 at 11:15pm

Duncan Riley has just assured us all that Persai will fail (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/20/is-pownce-going-to-the-deadpool/#comment-1860595). Interesting though to see Mike "the cruncher" Arrington use the word "deadpool". But but... from reading TechCrunch I thought this was the "new new economy", a neverending blisfful web 2.0 path to infinite fame and riches where those pesky annoying monsters called "business plans" were slayed by the hero of long tail economics. Shit, I just met this nice piece of ass on hot-or-not and she was going to code my latest Twitter/Zoho clone startup idea with a sprinkle of Persai code that got leaked to me from Valleywag and Kyle's mom. But now this acid trip is coming to an end? Rats.

joe / 21.Dec.2007 at 12:29am

Riley's calling you out, lads. Take him.

deep stoat / 21.Dec.2007 at 12:43am

proper 2girls1cup.com url: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/icanhascheezburger.com+pownce.com+2girls1cup.com/?metric=uv and don't fucking watch it. it's disgusting.

me / 21.Dec.2007 at 01:24am

ha ha. look at uncov on that graf.... http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pownce.com don't look so funny now.

retard / 21.Dec.2007 at 03:49am

Rounding floating points using strings, that code of a level I haven't seen since I failed out of Computer Science and ended up with an Arts Degree....

drchaotica / 21.Dec.2007 at 07:03am

@retard: uncovs a startup right?!>!>!! RIGHT

anon / 21.Dec.2007 at 11:05am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm A Classic! Also, sometimes it's better to try and fail.... Imagine if youtube never tried or google never tried. Cheers, Rajesh Duggal

rajesh duggal / 21.Dec.2007 at 11:16am

Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is a django Python developer. Seriously

dear santa, / 21.Dec.2007 at 01:23pm

Dude, stop downloading shit off of sourceforge and write your own code. It will work better, you'll get done faster, and you'll be happier. There should be alexa traffic graphs for sourceforge. jNotify probably looks like Pownce.

required why? / 21.Dec.2007 at 01:25pm

@required why? - right, because every single software project undertaken should write 100% of their code from scratch. NIH much?

mat / 21.Dec.2007 at 03:16pm

Just to let you know, PERSai can interpreted in couple of ways in the finnish language: 1) artificial intelligence from the ass OR ass artificial intelligence 2) literally: "ass ouch" Maybe these translations are more universal for your project than intended?

persai / 22.Dec.2007 at 05:34am

Hot Swap?

assouch / 22.Dec.2007 at 01:04pm

You failed... the site is 2girls1cup (but the mistake site is kicking pownces ass, which is sad aswell) http://siteanalytics.compete.com/icanhascheezburger.com+pownce.com+2girls1cup.com/?metric=uv and kicks the ass of pownce and chzburger by magnitudes unconceivable by culver...

trigger / 22.Dec.2007 at 01:45pm

um, why is vallewag talking about Ted and texting him? you can't write about them if you start hanging with them. next you're going to start doing dinner with arrington.

lovehandles / 23.Dec.2007 at 02:33am

http://polls.gawker.com/?key==UjNxQTM&voted=1 i can has DirectoryIndex?

dirk / 23.Dec.2007 at 04:24am

Please shlepelish - stop!!!! I laughed so hard I almost pee'd my pants! Sometimes a comment can make your day - thanks man! Cheers, Eric

e dewhirst / 24.Dec.2007 at 01:42am

I went to the Pownce web site and I thought it seemed like a sincere effort at making a client messaging application in a very crowded field. Whatever I read there did not convince me to install it as a desktop client, or to use it , yet. The reason I did not bite? I just could not see inviting the people I usually connect to, to yet another social thing. Most have been a bust. However, if you look at the page on Pownce's web site where they spell out what kind of tools and tech they use to build the product's functionality, it is a good rundown of what's out there for infrastructure bits like microformats, the slides at http://danga.com (worth the price of admission). My 2 cents. smart young group, not terribly innovative in a field of 'me too' 2.0 messaging crud, but a good lesson in deploying interesting bits and pieces from the toolbox. A team like this would be better working with me on a meant and potatoes vertical messaging venture, shameless plug for http://www.squidoo.com/ThruDispatch of course, I cant raise a dime for the development budget, as yet.

alan wilensky / 24.Dec.2007 at 01:35pm

Coming soon: Fail 2.0! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/12/23/cccrisis123.xml

mike cane / 24.Dec.2007 at 05:36pm

She just yanked that entry probably because of you haha. There was a post about tech failures of 2007 at Valleywag that mentioned this article and Leah. Made the frontpage of digg for about 2 minutes and it also got yanked. http://valleywag.com/337040/top-5-fails-of-2007

mojaam / 24.Dec.2007 at 11:07pm

Leah's post in Google Cache: http://209.85.165.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fleahculver.com%2F%3Fp%3D26

phil / 25.Dec.2007 at 01:50am

Pownce still has their timing all wrong. The API should have been released with the product, and the "beta" stage invites system gave it the hype and flooded it with traffic pretty quick, all of which lasted like 2 weeks then died out. I only know of two people who use it still. The sad part is, it actually has some nice features. I love file transfers and the groups settings, but no solid native desktop client (the air client always sucked ass for me) and the lack of the API, and no IM, the twitter crowd went right back to where they came from. But getting a "normal" person onto Twitter isnt easy either, and downtime has always been an issue for Twitters stability, Pownce has a higher appeal to people like my sister or the average person I might come across who likes the idea of microblogging or small messaging system. Twitter feeds a geek crowd it seems to me, with its @username and direct and reply codes, various desktop apps and array of api fun. I try to get a friend on it and they just done get it, unless I set it all up and show them the ropes. Oh well. This is a pointless comment. I just haven't seen anyone mention it since the release, maybe a brief API words but nothing concrete. /endingbooklongrantnow

will / 27.Dec.2007 at 05:30pm

too bad for pownce... and i never even got an invite from them.

michael / 01.Jan.2008 at 02:49pm

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Pownce Is Still Alive

inotify Is Awesome. JNotify Is Fail.

IN_DELETE and IN_DELETE_SELF Are Distinct Events. Don't | Them, Bro.

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