2007-06-28 20:00:04
Pownce Launches, Creates Negative Buzz
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The blogosphere was buzzing yesterday after Pownce.com launched. The founding team consists of Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, Shawn Allen and most notably, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com.
Unfortunately for the team at Pownce.com, the blogosphere was buzzing for all of the wrong reasons.
First off, many people have questioned whether Kevin Rose should really be expending ANY of his excess energies on any business other than Digg.com, considering the amount of money that investors have put into the venture. While he is not contractually obligated to spend 100% of his time on Digg.com, it is probably in poor taste to be working on other ventures when investors have sunk money into Digg.com.
Also, as Donna Bogatin pointed out on her blog, it appears as though Digg.com was used to promote the launch of Pownce, which would be an infraction of Digg.com rules, as you are not allowed to include promotional links to sites, only links to third-party news stories. The fact that a) the story received so many Digg's and hit the front page and b) wasn't taken down is pretty suspicious.
Thirdly, the product idea generated a fairly tepid response from the web community. Pownce is invite only right now, so we can't test the program for ourselves. Basically, it's a program/web application that allows you to connect with friends only on your "list." So, if you have a file that you want to send to everyone on your list, you just click one button and everyone gets it. Want to announce a house party? You can broadcast it to everyone at once, using either the pownce.com website or a small application that you can load onto your computer.
I'll give it a shot when the program ceases to be invite only. However, Pownce is off to a poor start, generating a large amount of negative buzz within a couple of days of its launch.
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