So I finally got a chance to check out Pownce, thanks to an invite from Pollie. Although I am still not so sure I get what all the hype is about, I have to admit that my first impression is...its pretty cool. The desktop application is written in Flex for Adobe's new AIR platform and allows you to communicate with groups of friends, individual friends or publicly by sending messages, posting links and events, replying to posted messages or uploading files (you can do this all from the website of course but its very cool to be able to do it from the desktop app). Publicly posted messages from you and your contacts are available via RSS and you can group your friends into contact groups in order to easily send information to only a select group of people.

While I think Pownce is so far a very interestingly different kind of lifestreaming platform, there were a couple of things I had to question. The first is that the desktop app is begging to feel more like a chat application, with more automatic feedback instead of reliance on the refresh button. Plus, when replying to messages or viewing files, you are still directed to the website, which in most cases is fine, but not so much when the image appears all by its lonesome...without even a background. Also, and perhaps this is because so many other applications have jumped on the band wagon, where is the mobile support?

Still, I am intrigued and have thus invited several friends...we'll see.

Posted by Cat at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my quest to find the best life streaming application, I logged back in to my tumblr account (which I must admit I haven't used since I set it up). I tried to import some feeds, but the only one that appeared to be successful was my blog feed (which imported one post). My flickr, del.icious and digg accounts appear to have not imported anything. Finally, I decided to add my flickr as a photo url instead of importing it via my username and that worked but only for one photo, which is displayed with a description but no name. I guess these features are still a little buggy. I have contacted support, we'll see what they say.

If they get these bugs sorted out, which I'm sure they eventually will, I think I would use this. There is some pretty interesting functionality built into the site. Probably the most interesting feature is the ability to host your tumblr on your own domain, although I haven't tried that yet. Also, they seem to have specific support for video, which is nice. And of course, their mobile stuff works (unlike jaiku...for the US at least). Your tumblr page is also much more customizable then many of the 'lifestreaming' software I've subscribed to recently. Although I have stuck with a default setting for now, I can see how this could be useful. By using the customize option, it seems that one could have ultimate control over the design. I like this idea because it seems to take the concept of blogging software a step further by looking and having functionality similar to a blog but allowing you to import feeds from everywhere, without having to download, install and deal with annoying modules and making things yourself.

However, perhaps because of this blog-like setup, tumblr does not feel very social to me in the way that jaiku could potentially become (a problem I have always had with blogs in general). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps the merging of these two applications would actually produce something more interesting then each on its own. Plus tumblr has no badges to promote the service on other sites, something that could be helpful in promoting the service as well as making it more social. Maybe thats in the works?? So far my vote goes to jaiku as long as they get their shortcode soon. But, if my feeds ever get imported, I have some plans for tumblr :)

***Update: It seems that my flickr feed may actually be working now. Still no luck with del.icio.us....it says there is an error accessing the URL of my username.

Posted by Cat at 01:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just signed up for Wink, which advertises itself as a people search engine. When you sign up you can add all of the social networking sites, media sharing sites, bookmarking services, mobile sites and other places that you use online (including your blog or website). I had some problems adding my myspace, it kept saying that the URL was not valid. But other then that, everything else worked pretty smoothly and they have a large number of places you can add, from the usual suspects like facebook, del.icio.us, digg, last fm and flickr to less popular inclusions like eyespot, jumpcut and stubleupon. It also features a widget that you can post on any website:

And a firefox plugin that can be added to your browser toolbar.

So far it seems pretty interesting. i would have liked some sort of inclusion of tags (like what correlate.us does). But overall, not bad. The problem is, I wonder if the social aspects of the site are robust enough for people to actually visit wink to view people's profiles and search. For me, it seems that the widget feature may actually be the most useful if included in my blog, myspace etc.

Posted by Cat at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After reading this article on Lifestream Blog, I decided to sign up for an account on correlate.us, a lifestreaming application that allows you to input feeds from del.icio.us, flickr, lastfm and twitter and has also created an application available on facebook. You can check out my profile here. So far, i am not particularly impressed with the user interface and the graphing feature does not seem to work, as the last time I looked it showed that all of my information was coming from del.icio.us and nothing from flickr. It also seems that the representation of tags is not accurate. Despite these problems (to be expected as this seems to be a side project) the idea is interesting. However, there seems to be no social aspect to the service yet besides using it on facebook, which makes it really not useful to me right now. I clicked on 'my friends' and it gave me no option to invite or find friends.

I have my own opinions on lifestreaming in general, which I will not get into here. But, unless they are planning to do an overhaul of the design and social functionality, I don't think I would use this particular site in its current state.

Posted by Cat at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)