I was just faced with a Twitter holding page. I quite like it.

It’s quite nice – I like the bird and the friendly explanation. It did however, redirect me to my Twitter homepage, and not to the page I was originally trying to access…

I don’t normally write about my work here, but thought I’d mention that I just published my mock-up of the SPLASH project on the University of Sussex SPLASH project blog: http://splashproject.blogspot.com/2007/10/mock-up.html

Please comment on the project blog itself.

No, it’s just International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Pirates were cool in like, 2004. Now it’s all about bandits in my opinion. Talk Like a Bandit Day anyone?

Just signed up to Pownce, which appears to be Twitter, with file sharing and without forcing incorrect grammar on the user. Also you can group your contacts into ‘sets’ which you choose yourself. At the moment it’s invitation only/join a waiting list. I set my facebook status to ‘Anyone on Pownce?’ and within half an hour, I’d been sent an invite code. Not bad.

The name is a bit dodgy in my opinion – too close to ‘ponce’, but maybe they were playing on gaming lingo’s ‘pwn’ (meaning ‘own’, as in, ‘you totally got pwned’), and mixing that in with pounce (like a cat?).

Anyway, in the sign-up process, they’d clearly been taking notice of gender debates and, taking a light-hearted approach to the complicated subject, came up with this:

Brilliant. This beats facebook’s tolerance of selecting neither gender by about a million. FYI, I chose ‘Lady’.

Beth’s pownce

Also, they only have 4 templates at the moment, but they’re very nice.