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Daniel Burka, co-founder and head designer for Pownce, has generated some buzz by posting a screenshot teaser of an upcoming release (shown above).

From what we can see in the shot - a search box, an upload link, and parts of the words “Artist” and “Playlist” - it appears to be some sort of browser-based music player.

Just a couple days ago Pownce started allowing users to post files to the general public, not just their Pownce friends. The micro-blogging format, however, only allows one file to be posted at a time, although these individual files can be played back in a simple Flash player.

This new player might allow users to upload batches of audio files and share them with friends as mixtapes, which would put the service in competition with sites like Muxtape, Mixwit, Mixaloo, and Imeem.

Seen more broadly and in light of recent lifts in file size limits, this could be a sign that Pownce is trying to differentiate itself from Twitter by heading further in the file sharing direction, as suggested by Duncan Riley just the other day. It seems as though Pownce’s already-vague “send stuff to your friends” tagline isn’t broad enough after all.

Thanks Ryan for the tip.

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Pownce, a service that lets users send messages, files, links, and events to friends, first launched into private beta over six months ago. It was founded by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka (Rose and Burka of Digg fame).

Tonight at midnight PST Pownce leaves private beta and anyone can join. There are 150,000 or so users in the service now - users have been waitlisted so that the sole developer, Culver, could maintain site performance. The site is still run with Culver as the only full time employee.

A number of new features are also being added to the service. A new version of their desktop client has is part of the release (version 3), built on the Adobe Air platform. The new version also allows users to directly respond to messages from friends. Previously users had to go to the websites to respond, making conversations more difficult. Burka says this feature allows users to “respond freakishly fast.”

Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new version allows users to import friend lists from any/all of Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. More services will be added regularly, Culver says.

A big part of Pownce is event invitations, although previously users could only view events via a mini-list embedded in the right sidebar of the site. Events are now also broken out into their own page, with public views as well as lists of a user’s events that they are holding or attending. They can then be downloaded into Google Calendar of iCal format. See last screen shot below.

The most interesting new feature is a group of lists that highlight interesting users. This isn’t just a list of top users by number of friends or number of posts, but a more editorialized list of people who might be interesting to follow. These are called “Featured Powncers” - you can see how they are highlighted in the top screen shot.

Pownce isn’t a Twitter clone, as Culver says repeatedly. To me it’s more of a Twitter “plus” (see our now-dated comparison from last July), since it incorporates file sharing and event invitations as well as simple messages. Pownce also skipped the mobile integration that Twitter is focused on. So they clearly aren’t a clone - but the real question is whether users will be likely to choose just one, or use both. My guess is the vast majority of users will only want to be on one of the platforms.

Pownce is still a distant second to Twitter in terms of traffic, but given that they were in private beta the comparison wasn’t entirely fair (the number of users was highly regulated). The real question is whether users flock to the service starting tomorrow, when the gates are open to all. And remember that Pownce, with a tiny burn rate, doesn’t need to hit Facebook-like numbers, or even a fraction of that, to be a success. They can grow at their own pace. Who knows, they may be here long after many of today’s “hot” startups are a distant memory.

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The Kevin Rose/ Leah Culver Twitter meets file sharing network Pownce has finally launched a public API, 3 months after first announcing that an API was coming.

Pownce launched in late June to a surge of interest based around the involvment of the ever-popular Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3), however the popularity has not lasted. Both Compete and Alexa show big drops in traffic from Pownce as users have abandoned the platform, Alexa showing a remarkable 80% drop in traffic. The Pownce AIR client was buggy at launch and the lack of an open API has meant that whilst Twitter continues to grow with the assistance of an ever increasing range of third party apps, Pownce has actually gone backwards.

Culver and Rose will be hoping that the interest in Pownce hasn’t declined to a state where 3rd party developers will not be interested in building for Pownce: it’s really the only thing the platform might have left to arrest its continued slide of user interest.

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Kevin Rose’s microblogging startup Pownce has announced a number of new user focused features.

New features include incoming event notifications, inline video playback, the ability to display social networking links and new preference settings.

Notably though, the additional features are focused on those interacting with Pownce via the web, not the Pownce AIR client. Of course it would be possible for a third party desktop application designer to create a client that utilized these additional features…if only Pownce ever got around to offering an open API; the last we heard of that was July.

The minority of people who use microblogging tools directly from a web page should enjoy the new features.

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Pownce has announced the launch of a group that will work towards the implementation of a public Pownce API.

As Pownce puts it so well on their blog “the lack of an API has been a major criticism levelled against Pownce from day one.” Desktop interaction is Pownce’s Achilles heal; the Pownce Desktop AIR client has been defective from day one. An open API will allow third party developers to create new and improved desktop clients, browser add-ons and any other interface they feel like, as many already have for Twitter.

Apparently though, it’s not as simple as simply providing a public API; the public part of the Pownce API requires consultation, design, development, more consultation, and last but not least a “community review” with a potential release date of September. All good things comes to those who wait, but the longer Pownce waits to release a public API, the bigger the risk that the mostly positive momentum behind the application will wither away.

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