Kevin Rose's Pownce Provides Challenge to Twitter, Jaiku

Posted on July 1, 2007

The hot new microblogging site Twitter.com has already seen a challenge from Jaiku and other microblogging tools. Now the recently established company Twitter, Inc. faces a challenge from Digg founder Kevin Rose. Roses' new website called Pownce promises to make it easy for people to share files and messages with friends.

Here is how Pownce is described by 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."

The new Pownce website is currently invite-only but it is bound to build a following thanks to the fact that Rose can make use of his own popularity and the highly trafficked Digg.com website. Some have already branded Pownce as a Twitter killer. However, Pownce initially lacks the community that has already been established for several months on Twitter. Twitter is also far ahead with the Twitter API and the large number of applications that have been built specifically for Twitter. There are also many news services and organizations providing daily information for Twitter users. It will take a while for Pownce to duplicate this effort and by the time it does Twitter's traffic will have grown even larger and new services and features will have been added.

For a breakdown of Twitter vs. Pownce features check out this post from Michael Arrington. As Arrington notes Twitter could easily add any features they don't already have: "I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway."

Image: Pownce