Kevin Rose: YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG
/ 29.Jun.2007
There's no way I could sleep tonight without ripping the shit out of Pownce. The only thing that really irritates me about Pownce is that it has to exist on the same internet that I use.
Pownce is a web service that lets you "share stuff with your friends". Translated into non-retard speak, this means "a website where you can go to put notes and files and shit up for other users". What was that? You remember FTP too? Yeah, from nineteen seventy-fucking one? Now it has pastel colors, and it's invite-only.
Pownce also feels a little bit like Twitter except that its user interface makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out with a fork. That, and it serves quite a few 503s. Hooray for graceful degradation.
I Can't Hear You Over The Sound Of How Awesome I Am
So okay, let's have a look at the technical merits of Pownce. First up JavaScript, and lots of it. Yeah, there's like 3kb of JavaScript written by Leah Culver. Leah, it seems, is a staunch advocate of "fickle programming", where you're not quite sure what you want to do. Take this snippet for example:
...
$('message_div').appendChild(msg_div);
Effect.Appear(msg_div);
// fade the error message after some time?
//setTimeout("Effect.Fade(msg_div);", 10*1000);
...
Yeah, we're not quite sure if we wanna fade this message, but we'll just leave useless comments in production code that gets unnecessarily sent over the wire. Who cares? Everyone who uses our service has a cable modem. Yeah, I'm a latency crank. Blow me. Amateurs.
Pownce lets you upload files with a 10MB maximum size, which is about as useful as a tumor. File uploads on the internet aren't useful unless they're:
- A) copyrighted content
- B) porn
- C) both A and B
Stop All The Downloadin'
Sure, you could put a few mp3s up there, but without larger file sizes, it's functionally useless. Oh, you can pay $20/year for the privilege of 100MB file uploads. Whoop-de fucking doo. They use Amazon S3 as a data store, which will cost you $1.80 to store a gigabyte of data for a year if you use it independently of Pownce. Overpriced much?
While we're on the subject of "freemium" web services, let's discuss payment. Kevin, if you are reading this, this is the one line you really need to take to heart: don't make me sign up for fucking Paypal to use your lame ass web service. Paypal is the only web service with hooves.
Oh yeah, when you pay, you also get to bypass all the ads. Considering all the would-be users of this service are already trained enough to ignore online ads, this doesn't seem like much of a draw.
What The Fuck Is Megatechtronium
Supposedly that's the company that develops Pownce. What, Hypercompuglobalmeganet was taken?
Did I mention that Pownce sucks balls at being usably fast? The latency is ridiculous, up to 15 seconds for some page loads. If you're going to serve ads, your latency needs to be under 500ms. ALL THE TIME. But that doesn't matter, this is Web 2.0.
There's also some kind of desktop application that goes with Pownce. You can use it to send and receive notes. Yeah, I know it's funny, but stick with me, this is gonna be a good burn. If you were going to write a desktop application in a common runtime so that users on all platforms could run it, what would you choose? Yeah, I said Java too.
If you're Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, or Shawn Allen, chances are you said AIR. What is AIR? It stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime. It's a platform agnostic runtime that is installed fucking nowhere. You need to install this runtime to use Pownce's desktop app, and they even go so far as to say, "Don't know if you have it? If you're not sure, you probably don't have it installed." Translated, this means "We're trying really really hard to force traction on this runtime, so download this. Really, it's like RealPlayer being the future of internet video."
DELETE FROM Internet
The best part of this whole experience is how I came across an invite to Pownce. A co-worker of mine had an account with a few invites. She kept giving out invitations, until she had -50 invites. Negative fifty. That's some nice bounds checking there. Was it on purpose? Eh, fuck, at this point who cares?
Now let's watch the Web 2.0 circlejerk play ookie cookie with this one.
#uncov on Freenode. Come say hi.
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