Why Didn’t Pownce Trounce Twitter? – with Leah Culver
mixergy.com
mixergy.com
Didn't watch the video, but she seems to be complaining about the competition.
Competition is good. Competition keeps you on your toes and validates your ideas. She can complain all she wants that Pownce wasn't in the same space, but it sure looked like a souped-up Twitter to me and a bunch of other people, and they should've responded to that.
And the reality is, Pownce wasn't a worthy competitor to Twitter. Twitter started not by being a closed-in environment, but by trying to reach out to every device, website and service you owned. The API and SMS integration were critical for Twitter to get traction in the early days; everyone on a Mac used Twitteriffic, other web services were coming out all the time that talked to Twitter, and the SMS integration helped people stay connected and get used to the idea of Twitter in their pockets.
Pownce launched with a decent looking web app and a poor AIR app, back when AIR was the next big thing. Their v1 API took months to come out, and it only allowed for read-only access - their API didn't get up to snuff until eight months after launch, and by then everyone had lost interest.
You should watch the interview. Or atleast let it play in the background while you do other tasks (like I did). She didn't seem to complain about twitter at all, and expressed that she was surprised about all the Pounce vs. Twitter hype when they launched.
I really hated that the comparison to Twitter. I think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good competition, determined competition. I think there is definitely different levels of start ups and Twitter was definitely (laughs) a good start up, and it's really hard to compete or be compared to.
I don't feel like Twitter was anywhere close to a sure thing at that point - Twitter was having tons of scaling problems, people weren't sure that 140 characters would be enough (files? links? other metadata?) and there were loads of competitors that were looking like likely takeovers. Pownce would've been in the running had they run with it; I distinctly remember looking at Pownce and really liking it, but the desktop client experience was poor and I pretty much ditched it after the first few days.
I think a killer start-up might be a mix of video and transcripts... maybe outsource the transcriptions since the technology isn't there yet. Then again, I might read a transcription even if it was garbled like Google Voice messages.
....but who else is doing what he's doing: Longform interviews with people who made stuff a lot of us know about?
Has anyone produced a better interview with ojbyrne? kn0thing? Not that I've seen anywhere.
For all the (valid) griping about how articles are presented on HN, I'd think someone like Andrew trying to create a new, "ultimate" format for presenting a longform interview would be welcomed.
Note: This is not a criticism of your comment... more a call for clarification.
Doesn't sound like the sort of engineering know-how that would lead to a scalable system.