I was invited to pownce.com today. It’s a hot new Web 2.0 messaging applications that is also developed by a really hot developer in a hot language using a hot framework.
It’s still in BETA and the new accounts are invite only. I suspect that most people have accounts and the whole ‘invite’ thing is a way to make it sound cool. After all, upon registration you get 6 invites automatically. It’s not like they are controlling how fast they grow like google did by giving invites using their own criteria to control growth.
Being in BETA it means there are bugs, and features missing. It seems that one particular bug is rather significant. My Greek friends tried to send messages in Greek (in unicode encoding) and all they got was question marks. Not being able to communicate in my native language is a major bug. I am also a little curious as to why this is happening. Django and Python have excellent unicode support, Mysql (horrible as it may be) has unicode support, so what gives?