Why Pownce makes me happy

I like Pownce. I like the interface, it's clean, intuitive, and quite polished. I like the concept - it distills the "communicate with your friends" aspects of social networks into something simple, easy, and coherent. Even the name is starting to grow on me.

But none of that is why Pownce makes me happy.

The reason is actually a bit more selfish. In my last blog post I said that the lack of competition for ClutterMe.com is starting to worry me. Well, we can add Pownce to a handful of sites we've seen that "get" a certain aspect of ClutterMe. While Pownce's focus is somewhat different from ClutterMe, it's still the first site I've seen that addresses this aspect in a way similar to how we would. Needless to say, since the response to Pownce has been fairly positive, this makes me happy as yet another indication that we're on the right path.

More importantly, Pownce seems to confirm what I believe about the future of social networks. We're entering (to use a tired term) the "2.0" era of social networks. The past years saw Myspace and Facebook as the monolithic, winner-take-all social network existing for its own sake. The next year or two will see social networks starting to become a common web development paradigm, a commodity almost, similar to how "Reader's Comments" can now be found on practically every news website. This also means that there's plenty of room to grow alongside the giants - people won't as much be "part of a social network or another", they'll "use sites that also have social networking". We should see many interesting variations on the theme, as the concept of social networking matures and begins to reach its full potential. Pownce is one of the first out the gate; ClutterMe.com will hopefully follow not too far behind; and countless others will, I'm sure, join the party.

The Internet is far from mature, and far from its full potential. The next few years should be a lot of fun.

That being said... Anyone want Pownce invites? :)

call me... ClutterMe

Updates on the project:

My eyes burn from code. My ears ooze javascript. I'm one with my server.

Alex has been trying to get a nice log-in background for what seems like two days now. I'm not sure who is going to win, him or the application error codes that keep popping up like an old pimple before the prom. Leslie knows all about that.

We have contacted our logo expert, Peter Frost, and our new logo will be ready by Sunday.

Why are we getting a new logo? It's because we are changing the domain. That's right, hahagreat is no longer. We will now be known as clutterme.com. It's cute, relatively short, and relates to the site- something hahagreat didn't do.

Hahagreat will still redirect to our site, for now. In the future we might think of selling it, or making our next app with it. We don't see a use for it that does justice to its easy to remember-ness.

move ...

I said move

The first week of our start-up just ended and let's recap...

1) We're making a customizable homepage
2) We're quitting our jobs (and in mark's case not looking for a job) to start this company.
3) We have given ourselves until August to make something good enough to release.

Our progress thus far,

We've.. well, set up this blog. No, but seriously, our code chest is moving along quite well. Since last Sunday (I'm writing this on Sunday night) we've worked 4 full days on the project and have probably spent the remaining three days thinking and planning the project. Everywhere we look on the web we keep wishing things had our interface. It IS that cool.

What about the title 'move' what does that have to do with anything? Well tonight is my first night at Alex's house. His family is great. We are probably going to go into a system where Sunday-Tuesday is spent at Alex's and Thursday-Saturday is spent at Mark's.



Alex has decided to keep going part time at his job until mid July, which means we probably won't have an amazing deliverable until mid-August.

We played some street hockey today for our break, we practiced tip-ins from the point.