pownce

News of the Yahoo demographic's searching habits arouses a sudden love for space in Brian Cooley today. Also, the Nokia N97 gets a chilly reception, especially in light of all those delectably cheap Netbooks flooding the market. Pownce disappears, Apple suddenly starts recommending antivirus for Mac users, and Microsoft claims the Xbox 360 pwned Black Friday.

iPhone beware, the Nokia N97 is coming (PC World) http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20081202/tc_pcworld/iphonebewarethenokian97iscoming http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10110873-1.html http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1274500

Netbooks dominate cyber-Monday, at … Read more

Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.

It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.

"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15,&… Read more

Social-networking savant Flock has announced a re-branded version of its browser aimed at fashionistas. At the very least, it's aimed at people who like the color pink and lipstick marks on their advertising. Called Gloss, it's a pink-and-purple themed edition of Flock 1.2 that comes with fashion-related feeds and bookmarks pre-loaded.

The list of baked-in feeds for the Windows-only Gloss includes Cosmopolitan, TMZ, Glam.com, PopSugar, and These Boots Are Made for Stalking.

Gloss is getting pimped as a "fun" version of Flock, although I could've sworn that Flock received the same PR campaign … Read more

The latest Flock update for Windows and Mac introduces more services to its ever-growing list of options, as well as a battery of performance and stability enhancements.

Most notably, Pownce and Digg have been integrated as people services. If you're not familiar with the self-styled "social browser," this means that you can perform all Digg- and Pownce-related chores--sorry, that should be "tasks"--from within the browser's social-networking features. Support for AOL Webmail has also been added, letting you check that account as easily as your Gmail account.

There's still a long list of known bugs … Read more

The obsession with the ups and downs of Twitter among my friends has generated a great deal of bloviation, including my own. On a slow news weekend, Twitter's performance problems are fodder for a bit of theater and for getting some daily keyboard exercise.

The image below is meant to bring some perspective to the Twittersphere. On one hand, Twitter navel gazing (or any other navel gazing) is a waste of resources in the context of what is going on in the world. On the other hand, Twitter and its brethren are becoming viable communications vehicles for spreading the &… Read more

This post was updated at 10:49 AM with comment from Ariel Waldman.

Some Web enthusiasts find microblogging service Twitter to be addictive because you can say absolutely anything you want--as long as it's 140 characters or less. So what happens when "saying anything" translates into harassment?

One avid Twitter user, Ariel Waldman, posted an entry Thursday on her personal blog, declaring that "Twitter refuses to uphold (its) terms of service."

She said she started receiving "multiple accounts of harassment" from another user of the microblogging service and that when she petitioned to … Read more

I'm a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you're Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you'd like (I successfully added six).

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It's also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn't have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

The one crucial thing that's missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it's nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it's a one-way street. It's also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

Twhirl's been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you'll need the latest version of Adobe' AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.

Related: The many flavors of Twitter

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One thing Pownce is still missing after opening up earlier this week is a public feed. While the creators have hand-picked a selection of mostly San Francisco socialites for everyone to view on its main page, there's not a simple way to pull together some of the hottest activity on the site short of tapping into the API. An enterprising developer Bryan Pearson has done just that, creating Powncememe, a site that rates people's Pownce messages based on various characteristics including user ratings, the number of recipients, and replies from other users. When combined it's a fun … Read more

Pownce, the multifunction Web app for microblogging and file sharing is now open to every one, sans the need for invites. While invites have been made aplenty for every user to give out (I was getting about 10 a month), a few of you may remember a time when people were hawking invites on eBay for $10 a pop within a month of the service launching last June.

Besides opening up to everyone, there are some new features built in to entice members to interact with one another. The first is an all new contact scooper that will let you … Read more