Pownce is a beautifully designed, new microblogging social network that launched a couple of weeks ago and has been generating quite a bit of attention. In some ways, it is similar to Twitter and Jaiku, but Pownce has more of a focus on sending things between friends, like messages, links, photos, music, events, etc. Currently, it does not support SMS or IM and they have not released an API, but my guess is that those features will be added at later date.
Pownce started off as a side project by Leah Culver and then she joined forces with Kevin Rose (Digg and Revision3) and Daniel Burka (Digg) and together they developed Pownce into a new web service.
Pownce comes with a really slick desktop client (both PC & Mac), created by Shawn Allen of Stamen Design, that uses the new Adobe AIR (formerly know as Apollo).
Also, unlike many other web startups, Pownce actually launched with a business model. They sell unobtrusive ads that show up in the stream (they are currently running an ad for Laughing Squid) and an ad-free Pro Account that allows you to send larger files.
There have been quite a few Pownce vs. Twitter comparisons the last couple of weeks. Lane Becker of Satisfaction thinks that Pownce is actually competing with 37Signals, the company behind project management services like Basecamp.
Pownce is currently in private, invite-only mode, but we have just a few extra invites, so if you are interested in one, just contact us and we’ll hook you up, that is until we run out of of them.
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. We’re all out of invites.
