
Why Didn’t Pownce Trounce Twitter? – with Leah Culver - terpua
http://mixergy.com/pownce-leah-culver/
======
rufo
(Warning: personal interpretation ahead.)

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.

~~~
dmpayton
_Didn't watch the video, but she seems to be complaining about the
competition._

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.

~~~
rufo
I guess I got that sense from this excerpt from the transcript:

 _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.

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andrewljohnson
I always disappointed when I see mixergy come up on HN. The article titles
often look great - interviews, interesting topics, etc. - but I just don't
have the attention span to consume talk video.

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.

~~~
brandnewlow
He hasn't figured out a format that everyone loves....

....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.

~~~
weaksauce
Is that not why he sends out the information in multiple ways? I count four
right now: video, audio, full transcript, and a key points overview. What
other ways to present a long interview are there? Are you looking for every
question indexed and clickable as a link that seeks to the question in the
video? That might be cool for a second viewing when you are looking for a
particular answer to a question but for overall watching I think his site is
pretty flexible.

Note: This is not a criticism of your comment... more a call for
clarification.

~~~
brandnewlow
I'm not looking for anything. I think Mixergy is terrific and was sticking up
for the interviews against what I thought was unfair criticism.

------
ScottWhigham
I tried watching the video but, after 45 seconds of a Basecamp Haystack
commercial, I bailed.

~~~
kingkilr
There's no way the ad was more annoying than the interviewer.

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ajg1977
Wasn't Pownce the software where they were using string functions to round
floating point numbers?

Doesn't sound like the sort of engineering know-how that would lead to a
scalable system.

------
alaskamiller
I'm split on whether that 1 min pre-roll is effective or not.

~~~
raffi
I skipped past it. I've seen ads before in videos (like
<http://www.helpmybusiness.com>) but this was too long.

~~~
alaskamiller
It's more authentic than the usually mass-produced messages, I like that. But,
yes, length is an issue.

