I think you hit the nail on the head , those ‘extras’ that pownce offers is already offered by the myriad of groupware/email services out there.

I think the elephant in the room is jaiku now with google aquisition, already everyone I know uses google docs almost effortlessly , I can see jaiku integrating with google docs and gmail, and gtalk.

In my mind it’s just really hard to compete with google in any sort of broad range collaboration service unless you already have a well established user base.

But best of luck to them! It’s not easy starting your own thing.

But personally, I have no intention of using anything but Twitter. Why? Because I don’t want to share events, files, or engage in threaded conversations in a presence app. For me, in a window floating off to the side that I engage with throughout my day in a peripheral way, Twitter’s 140 character limit and text-only focus is just right.

I’m not sure I see Twitter’s so-called lack of functionality as a shortcoming. Maybe they don’t either. All I want from Twitter is speed and reliability. The 3rd party applications take care of the rest.

I was a beta user but as I am outside Silicon Valley\USA nobody I know was on it.

Facebook is really gotten hold of folks here in the UK but even that took a while and we have some of the highest internet use in the world.

I may shoot Kevin et all an email to get the PR machine working over here. I would like to see it catch on.

It’s not just a top-down thing, either. Everyone knows what everyone else is up to, and people can offer assistance or send each other relevant information throughout the day. The also know what I’m doing, and when it’s good to call or IM me or when I’m ignoring their IM’s because I’m in a meeting.

oh btw the adobe air app was there for a while :)

@josh holmes, sticking to twitter just for the user base? do you have that many “friends” on there?

@matt blodgett, twitter is not at all very well implemented, it’s pretty sucky, but’s thats my non tech opinion.

Tell me.. Can you do the following on Twitter with-out having additional, outside the service help:

* Write a note greater than 140 characters
* Share a link with-out having to shorten the URL
* Share a file
* Share an event

Let’s see… No, No, No and No. On Twitter, if you want to write more than 140 characters, you have to write on a blog, or in more than one tweet… URLs, well, if it’s less than 140 characters, but then there’s no room for a description… Files? Nope, you need an FTP site to put them on. Events? I don’t even know how you’d share it.

The point is, Pownce is not a direct competitor to Twitter. It’s in a whole different league. I don’t see any reason the two services can’t co-exist. Besides, through the use of Twitterfeed, I can get my Pownces into Twitter.

I’m really hoping that Jaiku/Google will eat Twitter’s lunch.

Otherwise? I see them [Pownce, Twitter, et al.] like MySpace. Social networking. Not so much work networking. Too young for me, but a great way to keep up with my teenagers. (The novelty of an Old Lady on each is enough for my own amusement.)