For Those Who Like Sharing . . . With a Chosen Few

By Jason Pontin

Just now, the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley, minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors – is Pownce, but only a chosen few can try out its Web site.

Kevin Rose, the co-founder and chief architect of Digg, a hugely popular news site, in late June introduced Pownce, a social- networking service that combines messaging with file sharing. Rose immediately endowed his latest venture with some mystique by declaring that, for the time being, only those with invitations would be permitted to test his new site.

Within days, invitations were selling on eBay . Rose has declined all requests to be interviewed about the service, including my own. But as a consolation, he sent me a coveted invitation. I enjoyed the rare thrill of cyberhipness – and got to experiment with the site.

I learned that you can send text messages to individual friends or groups of friends on Pownce as well as post microblogs, or short announcements, to the larger Pownce community. This function is very similar to messaging services like Twitter or Jaiku, and is found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, although Pownce’s messages cannot, at least for now, be sent to mobile phones.

You can also send your friends links, invitations to events or files like photos, music, or videos. Of course, you can already do that on a multitude of file-sharing Web sites. It is the combination of private messaging and file sharing that makes Pownce so novel.

Om Malik, the author of the technology blog GigaOm, is an enthusiast. “I love it and use it constantly, ” he said in a message sent to me on Pownce. “It lets me share a lot of different things with the networks of people I really care about.”

Pownce was conceived by Leah Culver, a 24-year-old programmer who developed the site as an experiment. But its glamour derives from the reputation of Rose for creating digital media companies that evoke passionate fandom among their youthful audiences. In addition to Digg, he co-founded Revision3, a video production and hosting company opened last September.

“He is super-smart, friendly, humble and a team builder – a perfect combination for a great entrepreneur,” said Ron Conway, who has invested in Digg and Revision3 and was an early investor in Google. (A disclosure: Conway also invested in Red Herring Communications, a magazine and Web site I once edited.)

Rose, who is 30, dropped out of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he was studying computer science, to pursue his fortune in San Francisco during the dot-com boom. Fortune eluded him then, but he achieved minor fame when, following the collapse of the technology market in 2002, he became a nerdy host on TechTV’s “The Screen Savers.”

The audience Rose attracted at TechTV was then drawn to Digg, which he began promoting on his show and in his blog. Digg combines social networking, blogging and online syndication to create a site where news stories are ranked by popularity. Today, 17 million people visit Digg every month, according to the company.

After the contract Rose had with G4, the successor to TechTV, expired, he started Revision3. Each week, 250,000 people go to its Web site to view its most popular show, “Diggnation,” on which Rose and his pal Alex Albrecht lounge on couches, drink beer and discuss the most popular stories on Digg.

Something of Rose’s concept of his latest venture can be discerned in how he described Digg during a recent interview. “For us, it’s really about creating the platform for people to share things with their friends,” he said.

Owen Thomas, the managing editor of the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag, has chronicled the excitement Pownce has aroused , but says he doesn’t like the service.

My own experiences with Pownce were ambiguous. As with Twitter, I felt mildly repulsed by the banality and exhibitionism of microblogs. On the other hand, I enjoyed the privacy of the closed messaging system and the ease with which I could share things with nicely calibrated groups.

What struck me most was the site’s potential to be powerfully disruptive. Most file sharing occurs on public sites, which can be monitored by media companies. If the users violate copyrights, the sites or the users themselves can be threatened into compliance or litigated out of existence as happened with the original Napster. File sharing on Pownce, by contrast, would be difficult to police.

If I were a media executive concerned about protecting my intellectual property, I would pounce on Pownce. It is possibly no coincidence that the name Rose chose for his new venture suggests the Internet gamer’s jargon “pwn,” which means to take control of a system by exploiting some vulnerability.

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Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by MIT.

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.