Pownce and Adobe Air?

Pownce made it’s public debut tonight after quite a few months in beta and heavy speculation. Despite all the talk those of us without beta invites (or the immediate need to get one) were left wondering exactly what the deal was. _ Pownce is a way to keep in touch with people and share stuff with them._ That, to me, is too general a definition.

What is Pownce though? I’d call a landing page for your web 2.0 online presence with a dash of Twitter. You have the ability to post text posts without the 150 character twitter limits , post links (which is just the same as a text post, but with a button at the bottom), send files and post events. If a lot of this information sounds like it could be marked up in familiar forms, you’re right. If you have the Firefox Tails Plugin installed, you’ll see a few microformats on there including vevent, vcard and more. As for technology , Pownce is extremely open about those used which makes things fun. Even though the main site is in Django, which I’ve heard great things about but haven’t had a chance to look into, they’re using a load of other familiar ones. After the Flex 3/Air Tour in Orlando last night, it was great timing to see a nice looking Air app while still fresh in my mind. The desktop client for Pownce does just about the same stuff as the website, but a little quicker since it’s just talking to the Pownce API rather than reloading pages. It also automatically checks for updates. It’s actually a lot like the Twitter app I did for the November Adogo Meeting , except, well, pretty and with more features. Do you see yourself using Pounce? Or more do you think of it as a passing fad? I’m certainly not convinced that it’ll keep my attention, but for Twittering I would prefer to use Pounce instead. It has more beautiful and customizable interface, and is the kind of implementation people dream of when they have ideas for websites. For a “place to keep in touch with people” I don’t see how it stands out from other social networks though, aside from the fact that you can import friends from other services you use and it’ll try to find Pounce accounts for them. To me it feels more like a Tumbleblog with some links on it that’s perfectly executed.