AskTheAdmin Invite Give-A-Way! Who wants Pownce invitations? ~ Ask The Admin

Friday, August 03, 2007

AskTheAdmin Invite Give-A-Way! Who wants Pownce invitations?


EDIT 8/13/07: We just got more invites - want em leave us a comment!
That's right AskTheAdmin has been given 5 Invitiations to give out to our readers... Hit us up in the comments about why you want em and they are yours!




From the Pownce Website:

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. You can do it all on our web site, or install our lightweight desktop software that lets you get out of the browser.

Who makes this thing?

Pownce is brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another.

The team consists of Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, Kevin Rose, and Shawn Allen. Together, we formed a wee company with a great big name, Megatechtronium, that makes this software.

Leah devotes all of her days (and a lot of her nights) coding and developing the web system, Daniel creates the user interface for the website and desktop app, Kevin works with the team brainstorming features and advising the direction of the site, and Shawn develops the desktop app and the API.



How's it Made?

The website is which is and we use a database. The servers are and our web servers run a combination of and Perlbal (by ). File storage is supported by S3 from . The desktop application is written in for Adobe's brand new platform. We use some of the great Silk Icons and the icons
by Sodafish as well as some beautiful background illustrations by artists at .


From the guys @ Mashable:




Enter Pownce, Kevin Rose’s latest startup, which we were extremely
skeptical about when it first arrived on the scene less than 24 hours ago. Who
needs yet another IM client, we wondered. Well, we still stand by that: it IS
just another IM client. But this one simple feature, for an IM-junkie like me,
is vital. Send files to one person, everyone, or a group of people - we’ve
been waiting for this feature for all our online lives.
And it is this: on Pownce, you can send a message, or a file, or a song, or an event, to one person; or three of your friends; or only your family; or everyone. That’s
right, you can engage in private conversations, you can speak to the world, you
can have a group of close friends, and a group of associates, and a group of
unknown people you just added to your profile, and you can choose when you want
to send stuff to any of these groups. With this simple feature Pownce trounces
all over Twitter, and comes close to being more useful than most IM clients.
As far as other options go, Pownce has themes, which are nice for simple
pimping of your profile; it also has solid filtering options for your messages,
which makes your life much easier (try to find that link someone sent you 6 days
ago on Twitter).


Furthermore, it has it’s Adobe AIR desktop based version,
which - although still in alpha stage - works without any obvious glitches. It
has problems, though - it’s just a simple interface for Pownce and it gives you
only a small fraction of its features. This will not be good enough - you’re
competing with IM, not only Twitter here, Kevin - it needs to be a full featured
desktop client - think Miranda and Gaim.


Although seemingly just another IM app, Pownce brings enough cool features to the table to make us want to leave all our IM services behind and switch. But, therein lies a catch - it’s easy for me to switch, but how will I make all my friends and family and business associates to switch? To keep track of all the various protocol people use for messaging, I use Miranda. And I sure as hell hope that Pownce’s protocols are done in such a way to enable Miranda/Gaim/Trillian support, because without it, it will be much harder for people to become real everyday users.


All right show some interest... Hit us up in the comments!