One could sit back and try to analyze why this is happening; with Twitter as Pownce’s main “competitor” (whether justly so or not) and with Pownce having a reasonable amount of uptime problems – you could say this is a result of these two, or many other things.  But I’m less worried about the “why” and more interested in the “what’s next”?

That is why I asked Mike Malone, one of the Pownce team members that is moving to Six Apart, to answer two simple questions (which he was happy to do).

Leah said, in the blog post announcement, that “we’ll come back with something much better in 2009″ – Does this mean that Pownce will come back as a better service? Or, something completely different?

“It is going to come back as something “very cool and very different”. [...] Whether it will be called “Pownce” is to be determined.”

Pownce seems fairly active still. Is there any direct benefit to shutting the service down within two weeks?

“The benefit is basically that we can concentrate on the new projects we’re working on.”

After asking Mike to elaborate on the second answer, he stated that it is generally tough to keep Pownce up and running and takes up a lot of time.  Shutting the service helps them to free up their time in order to focus their efforts on getting, what they feel, is a really valuable new service up and running quicker than they could have without shutting Pownce down.

Pownce, although I really liked the service, never really made it into my daily stops insomuch as other services like Twitter, Brightkite, and FriendFeed have.  So I can’t say I’m particularly saddened about its being shut down.  However, I do look forward to Six Apart and the ex-Pownce team creating something new and exciting in the New Year that hopefully will be a more focused and stable product to use.

Thanks to Mike for answering my questions.

However, since I’ve never mentioned oEmbed here on my site, I wanted to quickly go through how it came to be, how I got involved, what it is, and who is using it so far.

How oEmbed came to be

I wasn’t in the room, so I can’t be sure without asking the four most involved people in the development of the spec, who was the “inventor” of oEmbed.  It was either Cal Henderson, Leah Culver, Mike Malone, or Richard Crowley.  Leah, on her blog, says that they were all at dinner and were discussing this solution.  So we’ll give them all credit.

I got involved, not the with the development of the spec itself, but with implementing it in one of the first providers of the spec, Viddler.  Mike Malone, who is a friend of mine who happened to begin working at Pownce, the first consumer of the spec, told me it’d be a neat idea if I implemented oEmbed early-on for Viddler.  I took one look at the spec and immediately thought it’d be a good idea.

What is oEmbed?

If you are like me, then you think of the World Wide Web as a library of information.  This information has a wide range of media types.  Just like in a library, there are countless numbers of books each having their own pages, photos, words, etc.  However, if I said to you – go pick up John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, turn to page 157 (which is the first page of Chapter Eleven) and let me see it – you could do that pretty easily.

Now, think of that page 157 as a URI. You’re probably used to seeing the acronym of URL, which rolls of the tongue much easier, but URI or Uniform Resource Identifier, is a much more proper term.  So it is an unique identifier for a resource.  In the case of The Grapes of Wrath, the resource is just plain old text.  But on the web we have URIs that link us to text as well as photos, audio, and video.

If I were to link you to this URI and you followed it, you would see that its primary purpose is to show you my iPhone macro lens video demonstration.  Viddler is the book, my video is the page, the video itself is the resource.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Now. Lets say that you were a developer and you wanted to allow people to link from your application to a any resource on the Web, and embed that resource into your application directly.  Here is a quick example, which at this time does not yet exist but I think it should. Lets say that you are having an instant message conversation with me and you give me a URI to one of your photos on Flickr.  Wouldn’t it be neat if that photo automatically showed up, as a small thumbnail, within our conversation just because you linked to it?  This is the type of innovation oEmbed allows for.

Who is using it?

It would seem that oEmbed.com’s “Providers” section is being maintained, so that’d be the best resource to see who are the providers of oEmbed so far.  It doesn’t seem like the “Consumers” section of the site is being maintained, as I’m fairly sure more than just Pownce is using this. I think Lijit might be experimenting with it, but it may not have gone live yet.

As of this writing Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce, Hulu, and Revision 3 are providing end-points for this service.  You can navigate to the documentation for each of these service providers by going to oEmbed.com’s Provider section.

Conclusion

I think if you are a potential provider of oEmbed you would do well to add it to your development roadmap to implement it when you can.  If you are developing an application where you think oEmbed would come in handy, and you need any help – don’t hesitate to ask me or any of the people I linked to above.  I just got an email last night letting me know about the tutorial on Webmonkey for oEmbed, so it won’t be long before the press of the existence of oEmbed begins to turn into tutorials for use and then I hope a large number of implementations are announced.  Like the IM one I mentioned above, I think that’d be awesome.

Until next time, I’m going to Pownce some Viddler videos.

Hack away people!

This is too cool.

(Source: PownceFS — Richard Crowley’s blog)

Starting today, mobile photos that used to show up on my Flickr account, will now be on my site. You can see the first one which is a photo of the TVs in the lobby at ViddlerHQ. I plan on adding a new section, to the main navigation, to handle mobile photos and notes that I post while on the go – but I’ll worry about that later. I am going to wait until I get a few mobile notes and photos up before worrying about how the site handles them.

Thanks to Owen Winkler, via Twitter, for hooking me up with this plugin that enhances WordPress’ built-in email-to-post functionality. Now, from my iPhone, all I need to do is select a photo and email it to a special email account I’ve created, and it will be posted here on my site within 5 minutes of me emailing it. Works like a charm.

As with the Photo section, all will be available through the feed – so there is no need to change subscriptions up at all.

I’ve also modified the way that my automated processes for notifying Twitter and Pownce of new mobile photos works. Now, both of these processes are pointed at this sites feed, rather than at Flickr. So all links will be pointing back to here instead of there, and will be for any new post not just mobile photos.

Another big step forward in bringing it all together. For those taken notes, I’ll be digesting the entire strategy to bringing all of my content onto my site sometime in the future when I’m nearly done. For now, subscribe to my feed, if you’d like the play-by-play of how I’m experimenting with this.

Next up? Links. (But probably not for a few days.)

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

The script isn’t anything special mind you, all it does it “watch” any Flickr feed for new entries. To be more precise, my server runs this script every 15 minutes and checks for new photos, when there is one, it creates a TinyURL and posts it to Twitter (like this).

But I wanted this to work for Pownce.

I immediately dove head first into Pownce’s API only to find out that the API didn’t allow posting anything. I thought my Powncing days were over until, out of some crazy stroke of coincidence, I read an article on TechCrunch that said Pownce was due to release a new version of their API the very next day. Turns out, I didn’t even have to wait that long and the Pownce wiki was updated to include documentation for version 2 of their API.

Without blinking an eye I finished my script, grabbed myself an app_key, and Pownced the script (you’ll need to be logged in, and be my Pownce friend to see this Pownce message). Once I figured out that I couldn’t Pownce a file to the general public, I knew I had to find some time to write this post.

Since then I read that Dave Winer also enjoys the way Pownce shows links to Flickr photos and that he is running a similar script. So I thought I’d put this out for everyone to use.

Powncer!

Enough beating around the bush, you can download the script here which includes an XML parser for ripping through Flickr’s RSS feed. You’ll need to edit the first few lines of powncer.php for it to work, so this isn’t your run-of-the-mill plug-and-play type script, unfortunately, but for the PHP savvy of you, you should be able to get it up and running pretty easily. If you need help getting it setup, just ask in the comments.

I run this script here on cdevroe.com every 15 minutes using cron. You may run it however you’d like.

I recently gave Pownce a spin for a few days and I really like it. Being that I do not use the SMS features on Twitter, I actually like Pownce much better than Twitter. I’m not going to dive into all of the reasons I like Pownce better because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am being forced to use Twitter over Pownce, sorta, because of “community pressure”.

Here is the breakdown of community pressure as I see it. There are a few reasons why we use services that, even though we like a different one, we still use the service.

1. All of our friends are on the service.
2. There is more activity on the service.
3. Everyone uses the service.

All of our friends are on the service. This is a pretty compelling reason to use any service really. If everyone you “know” is using that particular service, you’re bound to check it out and be part of the action. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with what your friends are doing, and not because you like it more than another service that offers the same features, then you fall into this particular facet of community pressure.

There is more activity on the service. Nearly everyone of my “friends” on Twitter has a Pownce account. Yet, they don’t use it. So, it isn’t a matter of them not knowing about Pownce, it is more about them not actually using the account they created. Why? Probably because everyone that has a Twitter account is using it right now. The activity is contagious and spurs more activity.

I have yet to meet anyone that says that Pownce doesn’t do something that they want it to, or, that it is inferior to Twitter in anyway. (With the exception of SMS, of course.) I believe that if everyone with a Pownce account shifted their daily activities from Twitter to Pownce at the same time, that the reverse could be said for Twitter that is being said now about Pownce, that it is a ghost town. It is all about the activity.

Everyone uses the service. This may not fit with the Twitter / Pownce scenario as well as it does with the YouTube / (everyone else) scenario. Here is a quote from a recent article by Ryan Carson of Carsonified that he wrote about using YouTube to promote your message.

“I’d rather use Vimeo because it’s beautiful, but the truth is there’s a lot more people on YouTube. If you compare 90 views on Vimeo to 10,367 on YouTube there’s just no comparison.” — How to use YouTube to get your message out

Ryan expresses that he actually likes Vimeo more than YouTube, but it doesn’t matter because his goal of reaching as many people as possible is better accomplished using YouTube. I like Pownce more than I do Twitter, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to be part of the conversation I am forced to use Twitter because that is where the conversation is happening.

I’m still not sure what the solution to community pressure is or even if there is one. You can’t fight trends. Being “first to market” is still one of the largest advantages in any industry, period. Even when teams like Pownce and Viddler innovate in ways that previous teams doing similar things have never done, they still end up with the same challenge of gaining market share by “stealing” it away from those that may have it simply because they were first, not because their the best.

Then again, these shifts usually happen over long periods of time. Fads don’t change in one year, but have patterns over decades. The Internet is a different beast, where it seems like these patterns have a much shorter wave-length, but they do change, and it is possible to find niches. I’m looking forward to the point where all services are so wide open, and applications are at the end-points, and which service you use no longer becomes as relevant. But that may yet be a little ways off.

Why do you use the services that you do?