Pownce is a new web application/service/business started by Kevin Rose of Tech TV, Digg, Revision3, etc, etc. It seems to be a combination of Twitter-type micro-blogging, Instant Messaging, and File transfer. (I don’t know if Twitter and related services are being called “micro-blogging,” but it seems like as good a name as any to me.)
Pownce is getting a lot of coverage, overwhelmingly positive. TechCrunch’s Crunchbase says:
Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. Users can send music, photos, messages, links, events, and more via the Pownce web site or through lightweight desktop software (available for Windows and Mac environments; Linux coming soon.) Only the people you choose get to see what you sent.
Pownce won over the skeptics at Mashable. It has Scoble, Matt Mullenweg, and a plethora of other bloggers chatting up a storm about it (okay, all Matt says is that he’s “really enjoying” it; I’m a lazy blogger. I’m sorry). There’s even a Wordpress plugin for it.
Did I mention it’s still in beta?
So, what’s the story? Scoble suggests that Pownce is gaining traction because of a better UI. Um, of course, having the magic Kevin-Rose-Web-2.0-Aura doesn’t hurt any.
Like any competition in the same space, it’s a little pointless to use two things. You don’t buy a Coke and a Pepsi and mix them together and drink them both at the same time. When Ma.gnolia appeared, amidst much hype and hullabaloo, it got quite a bit of attention too; but ultimately, I think it’s safe to say that del.icio.us stood out as the winner in that particular competition. In that case, I think that del.icio.us won because it had a huge amount of lead into the market-space. You could argue that the ability to move your entire database of bookmarks over to ma.gnolia in an instant negated that lead, but I think the fondness that del.icio.us users had for the service won out; we weren’t about to switch over just because it had a pretty interface designed by Jeffrey Zeldman, though a very nice design it was.
The point, if there is one, being that Twitter may not have been around long enough to have earned this sort of traction. In my case, I’ve only just started using Twitter, and I’m certainly not going to use both at once… who has time for that? So, um, I guess I’ll probably look back and forth at them, and eventually I’ll wind up using one or the other. Or maybe neither; that’s always a possibility, too.
Plus, IIRC, it’s written in Django ;)
I have a twitter and pownce account…I pretty much only use twitter and only signed up for pownce because some folks I know started using it. Pownce seems to be more feature rich than twitter and may win out in the long run, but for right now I mostly use twitter.