Je Hais Le Printemps

I know people who'll laugh at me reading this post, but, whatever. I often say: The problem is not the media, it's the message. That could make a nice conclusion, really. All right, I'll copy-paste it at the end. Couldn't hurt.

The micro-blogging phenomenon emerged a few years ago, now, and I was watching it very carefully, as a "brand new media", but was disappointed by the fact that it became "fashion", kinda like a new "web-2.0-bubble-buzz-wtf-bbq".

Twitter, came first. It allows to post micro-notes, known as "status". They must be 140 characters max. Period.

Let's add a small amount of "social networking" : you can add your friends status feed to yours and watch this continuous flow of mini-messages, more or less public, more or less interesting - this is debatable, my definition of interesting may not be yours.

Less than a year after that came Pownce, quite alike twitter: posting messages to the audience, and collect friends/contacts and watch their "notes". And these notes are not unlimited.

But the biggest difference between Twitter and Pownce is not in the limit of 140 characters or more... There are many others. And that's this bunch of differences that made me chose one rather that the other.

Plateforme, language, architecture

Languages, libraries and frameworks don't scale. Architectures do. -- Cal Henderson

[via]

Twitter is written in Ruby on Rails. This web framework allowed its creators to build a simple and efficient interface very quickly. Looking closely at it, there are two types of objects to manipulate: users (and their mutual relationships) and messages (status). If you users scale, you can bet that messages will either. Hence some glitches and blackouts that occur on Twitter very often. People laugh.

Twitter developers are even thinking about the idea to rewrite the system from scratch in PHP or Java. It's impossible to know if this would have any positive effect on their performance issues.

Pownce is written in Django. If the website is - allegedly - almost never down, but it's really really slow. Very slow.

Statuts vs. Notes (etc).

If Twitter plays the KISS mantra ; you just post text messages up to 140 characters, Pownce doesn't care about the size.

Of course, Pownce can't become a classic blogging platform, but the 140 character limit will annoy French users. In English, there are a lot of 4-letter words, while french textts will usually be 20% longer. Another Twitter issue will be about links. When you want to post a link, it's cut down using Tinyurl to fit the size limit. Nicce, but not that much. You want to click on the link where the comment is "Oh! yes! so funny!" and you don't know what it is beforehand.

Hence you can be Rickrolled or worse, stumble upon a website that is obviously not safe for work, just when your boss is looking over your shoulder. Very embarrassing. That's bad, because the whole web is switching from ugly URLs to SEO-optimized cool URIs, including words.

On the other hand, having a size constraint may be challenging. You have to find the shortest way to express your idea, unlike this article. There are even Twitterers that post only Haikus. Can be fun.

On Pownce, if the simple "Note" is the most obvious, you can send a link (the URL is stored in a specific field, so you don't need to squeeze the address), an invitation to an event (because you can precise the place, the date and time, and a description) or even better: a file. You can upload and share a file, downloadable from your Pownce page.

And if the link is an image, bang! the image pops up on your page, as a thumbnail. And if the link is a Youtube video, the player appears. Cool! You're not fooled by an unreadable URL, and you can get a preview before clicking.

Hey Buddies!

The two systems handle contacts. If Twitter manages things simply (again), Pownce allows you to create groups of contacts. As an example, I have a "french" subset of friends to send them my french notes.

But Twitter has an unbeatable feature: it came first, so it's really populated. Hence it's on this network that "everyone" hangs around. When I say, "everyone", it can even be software projects, US presidential candidates or even robots sent to Mars.

As a consequence, it's easier to find out people you know on such a wide population. And if you're all alone in one network, well it's not a network. It's pretty much like the "MSN Effect". A lot of internetizens use MSN because MSN was installed by defaut on a PC that was by défaut shipped with Windows pre-installed.

Well.

But if Twitter is larger, Pownce has ze killer feature. You can pick your recipients. Because you can organise your contacts in groups, you can send privately notes/links/events/files to a given contact, or a group of individual. Which allows me to send to my French-speaking contacts my French notes. Tadum kshhh.

And that's obvious: maybe my mum (if she lands on Pownce one day) would never read a Python API documentation I linked to, and my British contacts would probably not be able to decypher a french message announcing: je prends le train de 14:53 et j'apporte des bocaux de confiture vides à échanger contre des pleins.

About events, you can even get RSVPs to know if people would be able to make it or not.

Let's get a bigger picture: What about an intra-extranet application based on Pownce, in a company, for example. You could gather contacts by team, and project. The contact may be the employees, the customers, the externals (for example in a web project: the graphic designers). You can share quickly informations (Website down at the moment, please wait.) or the important documents (Here are the specs as attached file, please send your remarks before sending it to the customer) or you may invite people to a meeting (via the event module) - and know who would come and who couldn't.

Pownce is not only micro-blogging, it's... a groupware (ah! the holy grail!).

I think I've read somewhere: Twitter, is about messagin, Pownce, is about sharing

Openness, APIs

Twitter allows you to send your status via your mobile phone. All right, Pownce can't challenge it at the moment. If the SMSis very widespread, by almost everyone, I'm quite confident: I guess that the 3G and wi-fi access will catch up the GSM coverage very quickly, and that any mobile phone will be 3G ready by default in a matter of years. Then the SMS-size limit will not be relevant anymore.

Twitter and Pownce both have APIs, well-documented and nicely built.

• Twitter API
• Pownce API

Let's call it a draw.

Pythonistas: librairies are available for both.

Which one?

As I said earlier:

The problem is not the media, it's the message

But we have to chose. I can tell you, I have a Pownce account for a few days, and I started hacking on a Python application allowing you to use pownce via the command line. It'll soon be "publishable" and I hope to be able to add a module allowing me to cross-post my public messages to Twitter, much alike Thwirl. But Thwirl does the things upside-down. In my opinion, Pownce can do everything (send messages, links, files, events) and eventally filter the recipients, and then, this client may allow the user to send the same message on Twitter, if it's in the drastic limits of Twitter (message size + public).

Keep an eye open, then.