Wownce

Leah Culver: Last winter I was playing around with building Django apps but didn’t really have much direction. I knew I wanted to do something around online communication but Pownce really came together when Kevin and Daniel got involved. We were already friends so it was easy to work together.
 

L.C: Me, but obviously I’m the best.

L.C: I would normally say Cal Henderson, but we’re dating now so that’s kind of weird. I read Cal’s book, Building Scalable Web Sites, when I first started working on Pownce and it was a really great guide to writing a web app from scratch. I’m also a fan of all the Django authors. They’re all very smart but also really nice people.

L.C: Never! I think it’s nice to be able to choose which networks to be part of and I hope there’s never a monopoly.

L.C: Dodgeball, a social network for mobile location presence,  is by far my favorite (after Pownce of course). What I like about it is that nobody really uses it except my tiny close-knit group of friends and since we use it for bar-hopping, it’s perfect. I’ve been on Facebook for a while but it’s lost the small network feel that I like. Pownce was built for users to be able to maintain a small network of friends and I like that a lot.

L.C: Since I like small networks, I’m super picky. If you’re a fan of mine, don’t worry, you see most of my notes anyways since I send a lot of public notes. However, there are times when I really just want to share stuff with my closest friends and I also have quite a few Sets for different groups of friends. I love being able to choose who receives notes. Pownce feels much more like email than blogging to me.

L.C: I think we were pitted as competitors a bit unfairly. Pownce is mostly for media-sharing (video, pictures, audio) and sharing with a group of friends. It’s more of an inbox of cool stuff your friends share online. I see a lot of funny videos on Pownce :)   

W: Where do you see the internet in two years?

L.C: I’d like to see some identity consolidation but a range of services. Identity consolidation is tricky due to security and privacy stuff but a lot of smart people are working on it. I think it’s great that there are a lot of small sites right now that do one thing really well. It’s like having a bunch of boutique stores instead of one Walmart. I don’t really want a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Yahoo! to control where people spend time online.

W: Where do you see Pownce in two years?

L.C: It’s really hard to say. Of course I’d be really love to have more people using Pownce and for the community to stay as awesome as it is now. From a developer perspective, I’d love have Pownce running smoothly and have tackled lots of interesting problems. It would be great if Pownce were _the_ place to share media with friends.

W: Where did the name “Pownce” come from?

L.C: Kevin actually came up with it. You should ask him

 

 

Oh we will!

He just needs to get back us.. internet superstars.. ugh..

 

Thanks for reading,