The Pownce Blog

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.