Mario Sundar's Speakeasy

Kevin Rose of Digg fame is out with an interesting side project. Last week I wrote about how Facebook is probably a walled tumblelog, given its ability to mash your social interests ranging from movies to whatever into one very useful mini-feed. Pownce is an interesting concept, which was announced on Kevin Rose’s tumblelog today:

Today we’re turning on the splash page of Pownce, a side project that I’ve been working on with some friends over weekends for the last few months. The site isn’t quite open to the public yet, but if you want to try it out, enter your email and we’ll get an invite out to you shortly. Oh, and here is my Pownce profile.

The primary difference with Facebook is that Pownce allows you to unwall your garden, meaning Pownce’s “mini-feed” allows you to be either private or public and is focused on sharing stuff (text, files, links, and events). So, what exactly can you do with Pownce?

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

Looks like Pownce zeroes in on a key feature of sharing “stuff” with friends (a la Twitter) and hones it nicely. So, while in Twitter you sent text messages, here in addition to text messages you can also send files, links and events. Can’t I do all that with Facebook. Yes and much more, but the key difference here is that Pownce is not just open to a closed network of your friends, but like twitter affords you the opportunity to send public messages as well.

Apparently, it also resembles a slew of other file sharing apps, although Rafe Needleman from Webware says it works just fine:

Pownce strongly reminds me of Tubes (review) and Izimi (review), and little less so of AllPeers (stories) and Pando (quick hit). It’s also reminiscent of the file-transfer feature of various instant-messaging clients.

There’s also a heavy dose of Twitter (stories) in Pownce. Every time you send a file or note, it’s added to your running feed of activities that anyone can view; likewise, it’s easy to see the public feeds of other users and the private items posted by your friends.

Currently, it’s only in exclusive invite mode, but if you want to be one of the early few to check it out, then leave your email address on their site. I just did.

Filed under: Facebook, Twitter