Via TechCrunch: Pownce Goes Public Tonight

Just caught this on TechCrunch via Daniel Burka on Pownce — not sure how it slipped by me! Pownce, the long-compared-to–Twit­ter micro-blogging tool, comes out of beta tonight. Great news for Daniel, Leah Cul­ver, and Kevin Rose, who’ve worked hard to build a great tool for social aggre­ga­tion.

I’ve been using Twit­ter and Pownce for the last six months, on and off, and I’m torn between the two. Which is a whole lot bet­ter off than I was before, when I was torn between just how stu­pid I thought they both were in the first place.

Twit­ter, Pownce, and legions of tools that have adopted the “Sta­tus” func­tion, all appear to address the ques­tion, “what are you doing right now?” With Twit­ter, I didn’t really care at first. The pub­lic posts range from invites to meet-ups to updates on bath­room per­for­mance, to shots at sports teams, to cries for help.

Then, I ran into some folks on both ser­vices who know how to actu­ally use them. Take Alex France, for exam­ple, who goes by the Pownce moniker dignews. Alex posts tech news and links with short head­lines, and has become one of my favorites to fol­low, because he seems to share my inter­ests. Alex is 16-years-old, from Man­ches­ter, Eng­land.

Or how about Thomas Hawk, pres­i­dent of photo-sharing site Zooomr, who is using Pownce as part of his pho­to­graphic jihad to share a half a mil­lion fin­ish, cor­rected images with the world. Every day I’m greeted with a hand­ful of gallery-quality pho­tog­ra­phy.

For me, where Pownce takes the hands-down lead is in offer­ing the abil­ity to group my friends into sets. Close friends? Co-workers? Each can have their own group, and you can ensure that mes­sages you send to one group don’t clut­ter up the inboxes of oth­ers, who might find the mes­sage inap­pro­pri­ate.

Look at it this way: I set up a new “Clients” group. I can use the tool to send quick sta­tus updates to my clients who might need to know timely infor­ma­tion about our work together. In a recent soft­ware launch, the client group served as a key lynch­pin in deliv­er­ing timely infor­ma­tion to the peo­ple who needed to know it. And that, after all, is the key to employ­ing a tool that actu­ally fits the job.

This is the biggest hur­dle, still, and I hope the Pownce launch drums up enough main­streamish press to get the mes­sage out: these social aggregator/micro-blog ser­vices aren’t just for tween­ers and pro­gram­mers — there’s a busi­ness use, too. Find­ing the sweet spot where tool and util­ity inter­sect will help us all be more pro­duc­tive, and effi­cient.

If you use either tool, find me here on Twit­ter, and here on Pownce. And don’t for­get to find me here on Face­book, and here on LinkedIn, too!