This piece originally appeared at joshua.trevino.at.

I didn't want an iPhone -- though I had fun with its launch day 48 hours back -- because I haven't the slightest desire to interact with AT&T's inferior network, and because I'm pretty sure that iPhone 2.0 or 3.0 will have some extraordinary feaures and, more important, be unlocked. But I did want an invite to Pownce. I wanted one badly enough to spend a great deal of time insulting Scoble, annoying Susan Wu with mercenary inquiries, and posting public pleas. Partly this was because I'm a sucker for web 2.0 fads, but mostly it was because I'd been doing some thinking about the last such fad, namely, Twitter.

The problem with Twitter is that it defies easy explanation -- not in what it does, but in what it's for. What is does is simple enough: it allows posting of plain-text messages within a given character limit, and you can monitor others' postings in chronological order with your own. You can post from three sources -- web, phone, or IM -- and receive updates on the same. (The reality is that IM integration in particular has been problematic, but it's there.) The Twitter team, unfortunately, massively undersells Twitter's potential by touting it solely as a great way to tell your friends what you're doing at every single moment. This banal usage is indeed adopted by the apparent mass of Twitter users (to whom one must say, who cares?), but this undervalues the service. For starters, it can and does easily serve as a wholesale aggregator of a person's online presence. For example, anyone subscribing to my Twitter RSS feed will also get notices of my website postings, my Flickr photos, and my del.icio.us feed. This is all thanks to the Twitter team's foresight in providing an API for third parties to use: in this case, twitterfeed, which takes disparate RSS feeds, and routes them through the Twitter account of your choice. Twitter's cross-platform capacity has the further potential to facilitate what can only be described as smart mob 2.0, enabling political junkies to (physically) converge on politicians, or TMZ readers to stalk the celebrities of their choice. This capacity already exists, but on the software side, Twitter makes it easier than it has ever been. On the hardware side, the complement was released last week: I've been saying to friends that the iPhone, once liberated from its AT&T EDGE shackles, will be the tool that brings Twitter's potential to its fruition. (UPDATE: Rex Hammock said it all far better months ago, when he wrote, “what if [Twitter] were used by a group of transplant centers around the country to alert one another of the availability of a donor organ? ... The ability Twitter (in theory) allows to update someone simultaneously via web, IM, mobile phone, RSS feed, can provide the basis for life-saving applications and a wide-array of fun and business application.”)

All this is what's good and promising about Twitter. What's wrong with Twitter is its limitation to one type of information -- plain text -- and the concurrent limiting of that information's length. Twitter furthermore has a lot of fairly obvious back-end troubles, from a balky web interface to IM integration that doesn't work about a quarter of the time. Messages on Twitter are all fully public: there is no way to restrict recipients, and there is no way to segment contacts according to function or relationship. Finally, searching for Twitter users is appallingly basic, with none of the networking functionality that Facebook or LinkedIn bring to the table. What would kill Twitter? It would be a service that addressed all these concerns, while maintaining existing functionality.

Enter Pownce, which promised -- through buzz, not official statement -- to kill Twitter in precisely this manner. But having found a Pownce invite in my inbox this morning through the good offices of Patrick Ruffini, I can report that Pownce is emphatically not a Twitter-killer, no matter what Stan Schroeder says. Ignore its too cute by half signup process, and the fact that this has happened over twenty times in the past twelve hours; the bottom line with Pownce is that it fixes a few things that are wrong with Twitter, but lacks so many of Twitter's positive features that it is decisively inferior to its predecessor in utility and promise. Pownce lets you segment and categorize your contacts; it supports multiple information formats with no limits on size; it allows for non-public communication; and it appears to be groping its way toward Facebook-style networking with user-profile features that Twitter utterly lacks. But that's about it: unlike Twitter, Pownce has no apparent API available to third-party developers, and it has no ability whatsoever to push or receive information from multiple platforms. These are tremendous flaws -- the latter is especially irksome for those who grew used to having access to 100% of Twitter merely by firing up their IM clients, or turning on their phones. Pownce, by contrast, makes you download a buggy bit of Pownceware to serve as a standalone client -- and if you want to use Pownce from a mobile device, forget it. Perhaps Pownce thinks that I'll abandon AdiumX, and all my IM contacts from the past fifteen years, for Pownce; or perhaps Pownce thinks that everyone will rush to Pownce in the fullness of time, thus obviating any need for Pownce to play nice with Jabber, AIM, et al. I think not.

These shortcomings alone are enough to guarantee that Pownce will never meaningfully dent Twitter's base. But having inflicted injury, Pownce seeks to bring insult: believing that its consumers are amiable, quiescent types, Pownce pushes paid advertisements into its users' message streams. The irritation factor of this is tremendous -- and it only increases upon finding that you can stop the ads by shelling out $20 annually to Pownce for a “pro” account. Seeing ads pop up in my Pownce stream didn't make me want to enrich Pownce -- it made me want to ditch Pownce.

Am I actually going to ditch Pownce after a day? Of course not: it's worth keeping an eye on, and given that is is in putative “alpha,” it's possible that its deficiencies will be remedied as development proceeds. But for now, for those of you desperate for an invite (available here, by the way), know that you're not missing much. Pownce is pretty, and Pownce has some nice features -- but it has a long way to go before it's worth your time.