Unlike Twitter or Jaiku, Pownce is not a messaging service or a presence-announcer. Pownce focuses on your sharing stuff with your friends. That stuff could be photos, music, messages, links, events, etc. to your friends from your PC/laptop to your friends who are connected to you on Pownce.

Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) started Pownce with three other friends as an offering from their company - Megatechtronium.

I have been checking out Pownce. I am not impressed by the browser interface but the desktop application is much cooler since it is based on Adobe’s AIR. While we are still waiting for the Pownce API to be opened up, why are the feeds missing in a social-networking Web 2.0 application such as this? The ability to import the events into your calendar application is useful. If you shell out US$20/year, you are allowed file-sizes upto 100MB and no advertisements to bother you. Now, I don’t think that has enough pull to get paid subscribers.

Pownce is taking the lessons from Twitter seriously by adding members through invitations only. This will allow them to scale in a measured way. By the way, some folks you may want to befriend on Pownce are here. A nice feature about Pownce is that you can define sets of friends so that you can have your ‘islands’ of ‘friends at office’, ‘neighborhood pals’, ‘college buddies’, etc. No SMS or ‘moblogging’ feature is available, unless you actually access your web on your mobile phone to share stuff.

So, as you can see, Pownce operates in a slightly different space as compared to Twitter or Jaiku. We will examine these related spaces a little more closely in my forthcoming post.

Disclaimer: This is a real blog. Not a 140-character SMS that broadcasts your reply to the ultimate question that the rest of humanity is begging you to answer: “What are you doing at this moment?”In other words, I’m not twittering or powncing.

Twitter has received a lot of publicity, which helps me tread a little lightly on the details. The idea was hatched on March 13, 2006. Who’s behind it? Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams (of Blogger fame). It was born in Oct 2006, quoting from Twitter blog:
Twitter was in part created because we thought the increasing amount of folks using the status message field in their IM client to indirectly communicate with friends indicated a potential need or market for a service built around that sort of use case.

Essentially, Twitter users send short messages of upto 140 characters that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. You can either make it public (seen by all others who have a Twitter account) or to a select group of contacts that you choose. By April 2007, they had around 94k users, their popularity growing faster than the twiddling thumbs, leading naturally to some scaling hiccups. You can put the Twitter widget on your website so that your blog readers could know what you are upto each time you update it. You can integrate with your other IM identities from AIM, Gtalk, LiveJournal, Jabber, SMS Mobile Texting, and the Web Interface. Naturally, with a name like this, it has given rise to its own lexicon -Twettering, Twitterer, Twitterific, Twitterrhea, Twitterphobia and so on ….

Liz Lawley’s interesting post summarizes as: What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The service is free and its business plan, as per current trend, does not exist. Serious believers think that “you build it; they will come and a business model will emerge” works for Twitter. Its star is in ascendency, among its users are personalities such Robert Scoble and even John Edwards. This area of ‘mini-blogging’ has too many wannabes - Dodgeball (acquired by Google), Jaiku, the Status line of Facebook, and Pownce (Kevin Rose’s new startup).

In the coming post, I will be digging deeper and will analyze the social impact of ‘mini personal status broadcasting systems’.

Further Reading:

Jeff Barr is quite enthusiastic about Twitter
Fred Wilson shares a VC perspective, calling Twitter “the Status Broadcasting System of the Internet”
Alex Iskold expounds forth on the Read/WriteWeb blog
A counterpoint from Scott of Jangro
SF Chronicle coverage