I recently got an invite to Pownce so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it with everyone.

According to the site “Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person.” Basically, Pownce is a lot like an instance messenger but instead of being designed for sending messages Pownce is designed for send files.

There are two components to Pownce. The website, Pownce.com, and then the software. The site and software both load very quickly. The web site has a nice amount of customization on it with 4 themes, and a lot of options for privacy and notification settings.

The software is based on Adobe’s Air. I’m not sure why they did not just use Flash. Since they did not most users are going to have to download and install an extra component, Air. I’m hoping it was for a technical reason, but who knows. Maybe the developers just wanted to try out Air. The one thing I found strange is that default install location is to you account’s application data folder. Since the software is still in the Alpha phase this is something they should easily be able to address before they release it to the public. The software does have a clean and easy to use interface, but other themes/skins for it would be cool so that I could match it the rest of my system. Not sure why they have themes for the site and not the software, but maybe that is something they will be adding. The other thing that would be nice is if I could minimize it to the system tray.

With a clean design and an easy to use interface Pownce has a lot of potential. I’m looking forward to seeing how it shapes up as they head towards a full release.

Currently, I have 6 invites so if anyone wants one leave a comment and let me know what email address to send it to I’d be glad to share them.