Chit chat

Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Time flies and all that…

If you haven’t heard of identi.ca by now you must be living under a rock. Although my Twitter usage has been, well, zero for a while now I’ve made sure that my nick has been registered at identi.ca. Who knows - I might even get around to using it…

Of course the age-old problem is that I need to maintain accounts on Twitter and identi.ca (and all the others, but I’ve ditched most of those) whilst they remain walled gardens.

Much has been said already by others about identi.ca, so I won’t rehash any of that here. Of course they get brownie points for being Open Source and supporting OpenID. Once they add SMS and API support I think it will really start to take off.

Whilst browsing feeds today I came across the announcement for Nokia Chat. Initial reaction: oh great, another IM/Twitter clone. Their USP is the location information. If your phone has a GPS (like mine) it knows where you are, and with Nokia Chat you can let others know that. Nice, but there’s still something missing… So I read the FAQ and found this little nugget:

Now that’s a win. Chat with location services that’s not in a walled garden. I’m going to download the client and see what it is like.

Chewing the fat

After dropping a couple of social networks, then being invited I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, mainly about the value in ‘broadcast’ mechanisms like Twitter and Ponce Pownce. This train of thought lead me into a chat with the-man-that-needs-no-microphone Nik Butler, who is a big fan of social networking (both on- and off-line).

As these sorts of chats are want to do, we did stray quite far from the topic of social networks, but as well as putting the world to rights he did make me appreciate some of the benefits that can be gained from putting the effort into using these sites. This, coupled with the realisation at several points through the day that there were things that I would like to broadcast, but didn’t warrant a full post here has led me to re-register with Twitter.

I’m hesitant to commit to too many networks though – having to maintain a status in Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter and Ponce Pownce is straining. Ideally I’d like to be able to edit one (or any) of them and have the others reflect that. I use Gaim Pidgin because I want my IM in one place¹. I use a feed reader so that I don’t have to go to different places to get content. How long before there is combined client for social networks?

Although I have U-turned with Twitter I stand by my decision to drop MySpace, although my decision had nothing to with class. Quite simply it had almost no value for me in return for maintaining.

¹ Although I had to fire up another application to be able to have the chat with Nik.

Poncing about

Yesterday I dropped two social networking sites from my collection. In a “everything happens for a reason” way I received an invite to Pownce this morning, which I accepted without really thinking about it.

A minor digression – I get that you can’t launch a new brand these days without savaging the English language, and I also get that they’re trying to do a play on the word pounce but no matter how hard I try I keep reading and pronouncing it as ‘ponce’ which is:

…which, for me, ruins the branding.

First impressions matter. In the few hours I’ve been registered Ponce Pownce has been down more than it has been up – or at least every time I’ve tried to access it. I managed to get registered and add the one person I knew who used it, but that is it.

…which for me, ruins the experience.

Seeing as I couldn’t actually use it, and I didn’t really understand (I did say I accepted the invite without thinking) what problem they were trying to solve – apart from taking on Twitter – I started doing some research. Tony Hung has summarised my findings quite succinctly, which reminded me of why I signed up for Twitter in the first place – being able to, er, twitter from my phone or IM.

This, to me, is far more valuable than the prettiest site design in the world. Until Ponce Pownce (or Jaiku) offer both these methods then they’re lagging behind. Sure it would be great if Twitter had sets, and being able to add events and files to Pownce is a nice feature (although events are better served by something like upcoming or meetup). Of these, sets is the only killer feature over Twitter and that’s ruined by being forced to use the website (or their ‘desktop’ client which I can’t use since Adobe’s interpretation of cross platform is as bad as Microsoft’s).