Well, I’ll tell you what it is… it’s the next kid up to bat in the social networking game. So, are we hitting clean up here or is this unlucky batter number 9? Read on sports fans…

Pownce allows you to ’send stuff to friends’. At the moment, you can send links, files, events and messages. As you can imagine, it is often compared to Twitter, Facebook and the like. So what makes it different?

Two things stand out for me. The first is you must be invited by another user in order to create an account. The homepage does offer you the opportunity to get invited by submitting your email, but….. I submitted over a week ago, and nothing. I had to get a friend to invite me, so not the most user friendly off the hop.

The second is the ability to group your friends, which even gmail hasn’t mastered. Am still trying to figure out how to send a group email! Pownce allows you to create ’sets’ of friends so you can easily send party invites to all your cool friends at the same time and omit your work colleagues. No one in the office needs to witness your late night transformation into the naked amateur comedian….

Pownce also offer a Pro Account for $20 a year, however there isn’t a lot of depth there. The selling points are mainly sending bigger files and no advertising in the user interface. Hmm, both offered on popular competitor sites for free…

That about covers what it is…. What it isn’t though at this stage in the game anyway, is an effective advertising platform. Yes everyone and heir avatar are trying to monetise (as they should be)…. and there is a blurb on the homepage targeting companies that would like to advertise. But, at this point in the game, I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can’t provide any raw data, it’s my opinion that there just isn’t the volume of users and the users that are there are mostly from ‘the industry’. I guess on the flipside of the coin, there is always a chance you might be first up!

Overall, it’s still early in the game and I am very interested as to how this one pans out.

Popularity: 9% [?]