Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka. Pownce is a “social messaging” service which allows you to share updates, files, links and more with your friends, and (now) provides a robust API to work with your data. Here are the rough cut of our notes from her presentation at FOWA 2008.
Leah takes the stage, fiddles with slides.
Shows the “three forms of Pownce” desktop, mobile and web.
Explains the differentiation of Pownce, having “types” of messages.
Still trying to figure out what Pownce is, just like Twitter is. Microblogging, etc.. Leah calls it “social messaging”
“What is my web app” - Ask yourself what is your value? Web, mobile, rss?
“Your web app is your ‘rules’, some call them features or limitations.. they’re rules. Just like a board game”
On slide: “These things define an application”
“Your application is defined by the rules which make your game”
There’s a continuing theme of users owning their data. So far all the speakers have mentioned this in some way or another. Shh, don’t tell Zuckerberg.
On slide : API’s “consume, produce”
“I’m going to use your data.. I’m going to play with it” Surveying the audience for who is using which APIs.
“Giving easy ways to consume your data gives people incentive”
“I guess I’m supposed to talk a little bit about the future” , “I’m no psychic”
“I think there will be a lot more of little apps talking to each other. A lot more interop”
Hosted environments are on the rise. Anticipating what the developer community wants.
We’re moving away from “web pages”
There’s a lot of interest in building desktop applications for things that were formerly just a website.
“I’m done making predictions.. we’re going to talk a little about the past”
“We had a poor API”, “We’re sorry”. “I wanted to build functionality” “I feel we’ve let down the developer community”
Announcing the Pownce API 2.0.
“Versioning our API was the biggest non-mistake we made”
“The future of your application should be APIs” “Do it. Do it now.” “If you can build your whole service as an API, and think of your site as just a view” “You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches later”
Question: How do you think Pownce was affected as a result of a poor api? “I think it hurt momentum. A lot of people wanted to work with us” “You can always launch another version”
“It’s not the API, it’s the value” “Even if you have an audience that is not all developers, it’s the stuff that people make with it” “If you don’t have it there, people aren’t going to make any stuff!”
“We’ve considered a white label Pownce, or an open source installable Pownce”