Good read – particularly for curmudgeons like me who think Miyamoto’s focus on the mainstream is ruining the potential of gaming.

Wired – Game Life Blog

Let me first say that Pownce is a smart little piece of webware. The centralisation – and ‘pretty-fication’ – of twittering, email and file sharing is not only practical, it’s actually enjoyable to use. The interface is clean, straightforward and isn’t cluttered with a hundred different options – what you can see is what Pownce can do (uh, WYCSIWPCD?). It also seems that I’m not the only one who thinks this way, as this glowing review on Mashable suggests. What they pay particular attention to is that you can do things with Pownce that you cannot do with Twitter or Jaiku: send messages (or links, or files) to all your friends, some of them, or the public, which is pretty darn cool.

Yet at some point, it needs to be asked: when is one more social network simply too many? Pownce, like all other social networks, only works well when others are using it. Getting on Pownce with none of your friends, contact or co-workers using it is like getting on Facebook and having no friends: to wit, it’s pointless. And while Pownce is admittedly great, how many of you are not already settled into a social network? And how many of you would be willing to give up on Facebook or My Mashable or any other destination to transfer yourself – and all of your contacts – over to a new one? I know Rex feels that social networks are almost akin to drugs – when the latest one is no longer giving you a buzz, you hop on over to the next. But I’m just not sure people will be willing to keep moving.

It is for this reason that integration is key. In much the same way that I suggested that Wis.dm would fail miserably as a standalone but do wonders as a Facebook app, webware like Pownce is yet another walled garden that needs to integrate with other existing systems.

The problem, of course, is which systems to integrate with? Ultimately, the web is only a network of walled gardens, one hermetically sealed site after another. That’s why Jaiku seemed so promising to me: it offers centralisation, consolidation and integration, so that your contacts on Flickr might also have access to your last.fm profile or blog posts. Unfortunately, Jaiku only does so much and is to yet deliver on its promises of true consolidation (in fact, they can’t even get their Facebook app right).

The solution, however, isn’t clear. Do we need a “Windows of the Internet” – a (*cough*) ‘neutral’ platform for all social networks to use as a base? Facebook’s F8 platform has already shown the problems that can arise with that approach i.e. using a walled garden to solve the walled garden problem. Or is a set of open standards necessary? At any rate, there is a certain sense of futility now in developing new, compelling Web 2.0 destinations – no matter how exciting your product is, the question is not how you get the user to switch. Rather, it is how you get your user’s friends to switch?

[Update]: All right, I’m an idiot – of course Pownce has a Facebook app: Powncer. Trouble is, I still don’t care – I just don’t see why I’m supposed to move off Twitter or Gmail or both, even if Pownce is better.