How Pownce shoots itself in the foot

I want to like Pownce, I really do. It seems like, if used right, Pownce might be a good replacement for the problem-plagued Twitter (which I love dearly). However, there are still several deal-killers.

Any micro-blogging-like service that is invented after Twitter will have a big problem to overcome: many people already have their social networks defined there. For Pownce to be as popular at Twitter, it’s going to have to try much harder to automate the process of moving your friends over. Although Pownce has a feature that lets you import your friends from Twitter, it shoots itself in the foot by making the process brain-dead tedious. Upon contacting Twitter, Pownce presents an interface that looks like this:

You’d think that you’d be able to just click “Add Friend” one after the other to quickly invite people, right?

You’d think.

Instead, your friend’s entry in the list is replaced by this:

After a few seconds of waiting, Pownce dumps you onto your invitee’s Pownce profile page. To invite the next person, you have to click your Back button and click on the next friend to invite. What we have here is a wonderful example of AJAX gone bad. The UI could easily have allowed you to just click a checkbox next to each name and press Invite just once. What’s exacerbating is that while you’re waiting for Pownce to “proces your request”, it allows you to continue clicking on “Add Friend” buttons. However, the moment it finishes processing your first request, it dumps you onto that person’s profile cancelling your subsequent requests.

Here’s another one. Pownce tells me: “hey, you have a friend request, you popular guy you”:

Excited, I click on it, and here’s what I get:

Pownce LOL’ing in the background: “made you click on it, LOSER!”

Thanks, Pownce.

Jul 23, 2008 by mike No Comments