Why Didn’t Pownce Trounce Twitter? – with Leah Culver

http://mixergy.com/pownce-leah-culver/

by terpua • 17 years ago

22 18 17 years ago

mixergy.com

ScottWhigham• 17 years ago

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

kingkilr• 17 years ago

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

alaskamiller2• 17 years ago

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

raffi• 17 years ago

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

alaskamiller2• 17 years ago

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

rufo2• 17 years ago

(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• 17 years ago

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.

jmonegro2• 17 years ago

Or stream the MP3

rufo2• 17 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson2• 17 years ago

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.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

jwesley• 17 years ago

You are disappointed in Mixergy because of your own short attention span? Why is that a problem with Mixergy. If you looked around you would also notice there are transcripts and text summaries. What I like to do is put it on in the background when I'm doing semi-menial work and then focus on it when something catches my attention. Of course talk video has it's shortcomings but Andrew is doing the best startup interviews anywhere.

jmonegro2• 17 years ago

Stream the mp3, listen to it in chunks.

rms• 17 years ago

Andrew Warner does posts transcripts for all of his videos by using Mechanical Turk.

ajg1977• 17 years ago

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.

Why Didn’t Pownce Trounce Twitter? – with Leah Culver

Related Stories