I originally wrote this as a comment in reference to another post by An Bui but wanted to record these thoughts here as well.
Pownce (me) is an interesting application because it doesn’t have or really in any way (in my observation) try to compete with the ubiquitous input that twitter has but still tries to capture that need for messaging small bits of information with friends.
I don’t see it’s usefulness as a text/event messaging platform just because it doesn’t exist in the “always on” environments that something like twitter does or even other apps with a mobile presence (pownce doesn’t have one) but instead as a platform for sharing files and little bits of information that need (important) to be private for some reason (meaning only viewable among friends) and viewable at any time interval even up to several weeks between visits.
I currently use Pownce solely as a file transfer mechanism to transfer files, mostly music, that I’d like my friends to have or see in a protected environment but don’t really matter.
The problem is that you can’t see messages that you post privately to your friends from before you defined that relationship in their application which is too bad for the use I have for the site.