14 DAY TRIAL // My mother always told me when I was little not to talk to strangers. The advice is understandable, but I am wondering if parents nowadays are giving this advice to their kids and how it is taken by the underage. I guess it would be insane to tell your kid not to befriend with unknown persons when the market is flooded with applications that enable you to do just that fairly easy. And with all the social networking applications out there you could be talking to your own neighbor without even knowing it. Communities of strangers talking to each other probably date longer than mIRC (that is the oldest I can remember right now) and peculiar bonds have formed in those chat rooms.
Imagine a huge cyberspace filled with all kinds of people. And you can talk to any of them with no restriction. It could turn into a cyber party where everyone is actually LQTM-in while posting huge LOLs in the chat window. Social networking is what Pownce is all about. Pownce is a brand new application in this field, built for Adobe's newest platform, AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). To tell you the truth, Pownce is like nothing you have seen. It is a combination between Yahoo's Upcoming, Del.icio.us and Twitter, but with more than social chatting, link and events sharing as Pownce is also supposed to let you send files to your friends.
Thanks to Adobe AIR the flash interface looks awesome. It looks a bit like a widget, but it installs and uninstalls like any other application. During installation, you can choose to have its icon placed on your desktop screen and to launch the app right after the install process is complete.
After that, you can either choose to create a new account (these used to be sold on eBay a couple of weeks ago) or, if you already have one, enter the required details. Signing in did not take as long as I expected and almost in an instant I was able to view all the received messages.
Pownce has little options to offer, but I am sure it'll bring more alternatives once out of alpha stage. For now, the only options available are Mesasges, Links, File sharing and Events. Unfortunately, out of these four, only three are working without a flaw. The black sheep of the alternatives is file sharing. Pownce was reluctant to add the files no matter what I did. If you care to see how the error message looks like, check out the images below.
Exchanging messages with your friends or any other powncer is extremely easy. Just select the option, type in the text you want to send, choose your friend, and Post It!. The options available in Pownce permit message sending to all of your friends, each of them, or launch them publicly, that is everyone can see them.
With link sharing, the same steps can be followed, and besides the message you want to send you can also add links to your favorite news on the Internet. As I said before, file sharing did not work in my case, but the principle is the classic one: browse for the desired file, choose the people you want to receive is and send it. With the free version of Pownce the size limit of the shared file is set to 10 MB, but if you go for a Pro account you can send files ten times bigger (the price is 20$/year).
If you want to announce events such as you having an invitation for two for a killer party, there is nothing easier. All the fields necessary are already available and all you need to do is fill them with the name of the event, the location, time and date. Also, don't forget to select the people you want to send the invite to. Creating groups, to send the message only once to a bunch of peeps, is not implemented in the desktop application, but you can do it from your web account.
You don't have to worry about receiving replies to your messages because the application automatically updates the list, although it would be a good idea to have some kind of alert when incoming. Also, minimizing the application to system tray and popping up a balloon whenever a new message arrives would be a feature upping the comfort.
The Good
The application incorporates the best features of multiple web services and most of them are working properly. The interface looks absolutely great.
Creating groups of people and mass-messaging them is a must in any instant messenger and Pownce has it.
The Bad
Any badmouthing is irrelevant at this stage. But a few suggestions like implementing SMS service and alerting the user in some way when a new message arrives won't hurt one bit.
The Truth
The potential of the application is huge due to the fact that it includes a little bit of everything. You can send mass messages to one group only (although I wish I had that group collapsed and see who's in there) as well as share links and events.
With file sharing there is still work to be done and this is a major downfall, especially when you read the About section on the website: "Pownce is brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another."
Also, the desktop application lacks some features available in its web counterpart (ability to create groups of receivers).
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
