The Pownce Blog

We’re looking for a full-time Django developer to help create new features and architecture for the Pownce website. There are plenty of cool projects that we’re planning and we’re looking for someone to come work with us.

Since Pownce is such a new company, the ideal candidate would be self-motivated, excited about web development, have good communication skills, and be excited about new technologies. We’re really looking for someone with a lot of web development experience; Python skills and open source contribution is a huge plus.

More info here: http://djangogigs.com/gigs/11/

Please email leah@pownce.com if you’re interested.

Last week the Pownce team took a little trip across the Atlantic to the Future of Web Apps conference in London. The conference was fun and it was great to meet lots of new people. We also enjoyed the pubs and Indian food!

Daniel gave a good talk on interpreting user feedback and included examples from Mozilla.org, Digg, and Pownce. Kevin chatted about starting web businesses and filmed an episode of Diggnation in front of a wild crowd! I gave a developer-focused talk on lessons learned from launching Pownce. I also enjoyed doing all sorts of touristy things in London. I’ve posted my slides on my site and hopefully Kevin and Daniel will have a chance to do the same soon.

After FOWA, Daniel and I took a train to Edinburgh, Scotland to visit our friend James. We enjoyed touring the Edinburgh castle and going shopping (I have a thing for plaid and tweed). We also picked up a few bottles of Scotch! It was surprisingly sunny the entire trip.

Don’t worry, we didn’t stop working on Powncey things. We fixed a few bugs - login on the homepage and the date format of the notes. Per Pownce member feedback, we changed your friend profiles to show the notes your friend has sent you (instead of notes you share). We appreciate all the feedback and with your help we’re always trying to improve Pownce!

Why should we stop with a single round of bug fixes and small front-end features this early in the week? Leah took a break from some back-end work and we managed to get a bunch of stuff fixed and out to the live site a few minutes ago:

• Homepage login works much more consistently. We discovered a nagging problem that caused it to fail sometimes and finally got it fixed. Huzzah!
• You can now Accept or Deny entire pages of friend requests. Really popular people were getting annoyed by having to go through their requests one by one. You still can’t accept or deny all of your requests (it’s super hard on our database and you’re likely to miss friends in the mix), but handling them 15 at a time is certainly much more useful! By the way, it only shows up when you have more 15 or more pending requests.
• Youtube videos now play properly in Safari. It was a glitch… now fixed.
• Events in the Upcoming Events sidebar are now listed chronologically.

Upward and onward friends!

We’ve added more photo-sharing site support and fixed some bugs. Now if you add a link to a Flickr, Zooomr, or Photobucket photo, you’ll see a thumbnail of the image in your Pownce note. Thanks to our friend courtstarr for help with this awesome feature!

As for the bugs, we’ve fixed the Swiss flag icon, EULA formatting, the placement of the Add Friends button, and a bunch of IE6 stuff. Thanks to everyone for sending us bug reports … we’re getting to them as quickly as our little team can.

We just updated Pownce to complete our support for XFN (the XHTML Friends Network). That makes it easier for you to share your Pownce profile and friend relationships across different social networks. No idea what we’re talking about? Check out the XFN site’s own description, especially the “Delusions of Grandeur” section at the bottom!

We also added better support for Microformats and will continue to add more Microformat goodness as we move ahead. Thanks to Tantek for all of his help.

Leah also recently released an open source Django module for portable social networks. Check out her blog post about how she implemented this on Pownce and grab the code to add to your own project.

We’ve just released a bunch of new stuff today to make Pownce even better. There are a number of changes behind the scenes to help the site run faster as well as some sweet new things you can definitely see.

Upcoming Event Notifications
In the right column of your homepage, you’ll now see the next five upcoming events you’ve been sent. It’s a handy way to make sure you don’t miss something. We might make this more sophisticated in the future, but we wanted to get a basic version out first to see how it works in the real world.

Inline Video Playback & Inline Image Previews
We’re now automagically embedding Youtube, Google, Metacafe, Revver, Vimeo, and other videos into your notes. Just link to the page where the video is and the player with appear.

Like the videos, we’re automatically displaying image thumbnails when you link to images from services we support. Right now, Zooomr images are displayed in your notes, but we hope support more services (such as Photobucket and Flickr) in the future.

Display Your Social Networks & Links
At lot of people have social networks online other than Pownce. Now, you can display them on your profile, so people can find you elsewhere too. We’ve got most of the major networks (Facebook, Myspace, Last.fm, and others) supported, so go show your friends where to find you. You can also show your instant messaging IDs and link to your blog or website.

New Preferences Settings
Now you can better customize your Pownce. Some big feature requests have been addressed. You can now open links in a new window by default! You can also set your default note view to something other than ‘notes & replies’, and you can select whom you’re note Tired of seeing all replies displayed inline? No worries, you can set it to just ‘notes’. And finally, you can specify whom notes should go to by default (such as your ‘best friends’ or ‘coworkers’ set).

We hope you all like the new features and we hope you’re having fun sending stuff to your friends!

Sorry for the down time this morning. Apparently the power strip supplying power to our five servers burnt out. We were able to replace it quickly and get Pownce running again within a few minutes. Thanks for your patience and have fun sending stuff on Pownce!

There’s a new help section on Pownce! It’s got Frequently Asked Questions as well as links to our Get Satisfaction forum and Pownce Community Wiki. All are great places to get help, report bugs, and give feedback.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been helping us out with bug reports and feature ideas. A special thanks to our friend Ariel who has been helping to manage the Pownce community. Also, thanks to Stephen for reporting some security issues, which we’ve now resolved.

Interested why we’re using Satisfaction for our help forum? There was an interesting discussion on the subject in a public Pownce thread recently. Also, some people have asked why we didn’t create a FAQ section earlier… I guess we thought it was somewhat presumptuous to have one before people had a chance to ask questions with some frequency!

The lack of an API has been a major criticism leveled against Pownce from day one. The problem isn’t that we don’t have one, though–it’s that the existing API (built exclusively for the purpose of communication with the desktop app) just, well, sucks.

Some enterprising souls, however, have unlocked the secrets of our bizarre auth scheme and begun to write client libraries for the undocumented API. This was to be expected.

Of course, now that we have widely distributed clients (namely the desktop app) that rely on the existing API, we can’t really change it. But what we can do is create a new, public API, document how it works, then endorse and encourage its use by third parties.

Toward this end we’ve created the Pownce API Google group, where we can discuss its design and development with client library authors and API consumers. Feel free to sign up and chime in if you have any suggestions for how you think it should work. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you about response formats (XML or Atom?) and authentication schemes (HTTP Basic over SSL? WSSE? Frob/token? AuthSub-style?).

Soon we’ll be publishing specs for community review, and we hope to have the initial implementation up and running in September. I’m really excited to see Pownce’s evolution from web site to platform, I think that the API is going to be a huge leap in that direction. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

Privacy and control over the content you produce were two of the key factors we considered when designing Pownce. Of course, Pownce is all about sharing, but we wanted to give you the control to share your stuff far and wide or to keep things within a tighter circle. This privacy extends both to notes you send and to your own personal information you include in your profile.

When you’re sending stuff, the control you have is fairly clear. If I send something to three people, only those three people will get to see it. It’s a lot like email. If you send something to a friend, that friend could choose to forward it on. So, like email, your content is as private as you and your friends keep it. Choose nice friends you can trust if you’re sending anything secretive! We intentionally created a view of your own “Public Profile” so you can easily tell what strangers might see if they visited your page — they can see public notes and whichever profile information you chose to share.

For your own profile information, things are slightly more complicated. A lot of people don’t want to share much information about themselves with the general public, so we want to respect that. That means for public facing pages we’re only using your first name and the first letter of your last name. I’m Daniel B. on public pages, for instance.

However, discovery of other people is more than a little bit important for a social network. And, that requires some more identification. Just searching for Nick B in Chicago isn’t going to help me find my brother, especially if that person doesn’t have an actual photo of their face as an icon. Also, if you’ve got a kazillion friends, differentiating between David Peck and David Prager is kind of tricky when they’re both David P.

These shortcomings of the abbreviated names weren’t so apparent during our initial testing. We only had about thirty or forty alpha testers early on and we all got to know everyone else pretty well on the site. However, when we opened this up it got more apparent and we got lots of requests to use full names in more places.

So, we compromised on the privacy and discoverability sides. Now, when you’re not signed in (aka the general public) you can only see first name and first initial of the last name. But, when you’re signed in, you can see peoples’ full names in lots of places: the user search, on notes, in replies, etc. I think it’s a healthy balance.