I’m sure there are a dozen of articles like this on the web but I’m too lazy to go find them so instead, I’ll post my own review and ideas on what pownce still needs to take over twitter.

Personally, I love twitter for it’s simplicity. It’s incredibly easy to use and there are so many different ways in which you can interact with the twitter service, it’s great! Pownce has recently started it’s beta to a lot of speculation about it being the ‘twitter killer’. I’ll definitely give it credit. I think pownce is very well designed and stable definately has the potential to be a twitter killer, but it’s not there yet. A few things I’m going to have to see before I can drop my twitter and use pownce exclusively are as follows..

1. 4 Themes?? Really?? Is this really a feature people are going to be dropping the $20 a year for? I’m not. If I do upgrade to the pro account, it’s to get rid of the ads on my page and be able to send larger files (and I’m sure other cooler features that might be included in the future?). I’m not going to spend money just to use some new themes. I like the themes idea, but let’s make them all free and let’s add another option for giving users the really simple customization options you find with twitter. Like changing the background color/picture and changing the color of various elements. That’s all I really need for customizations.

2. Text updates. I love the SMS integration for twitter. I can be anywhere and send a nice text message to 40404 and have it turn in to my newest tweet. I know this is going to be a little more challenging for pownce because of the various types of update you can post and being able to post to certain people but use some default options that users can set and let’s get our SMS on! Also, I know it’s really small and simple, but I really love twitter’s ‘nudge’ after 24 hours without an update. When I get that text message, I already have my phone out so I can just reply and let the world know what I’m doing. It’s the little things. x=)

3. A real API. I know that people have started to document the private API that the desktop applications use. And I know that the pownce team is working on a public API. But this is just something else that I’m waiting for to bring it up to a twitter level.

4. Ruby on Rails. Yaaa.. This isn’t going to change, but a special place in my heart will always remain for twitter because it’s one of the first huge web applications written in my language of choice. So this is the one thing pownce will never have over twitter. x=)

I think that’s the jist of it. The list isn’t huge. It’s definitely doable (except for the last one of course) and I’m actually fairly confident that in a rather short time, all these issues will be resolved and we’ll see how I feel about it again at that time. For now, I’m going to stick with twitter for the majority of my updates and use pownce on occasion just to see what’s new or whatever.