Check out the TechCrunch writeup of Kevin Rose's new venture, Pownce. I am, of course, insanely jealous of Kevin for his wild success with thebroken, AOTS and Digg. But despite my petty predisposition, this looks like a winner to me. Here's the comment I left at TechCrunch:

This is Twitter, plus Dave Winer’s currently-gestating TwitterGram concept. I wonder how useful segmenting out events and links will be, though, versus just using general text tweeting for it. If there’s calendar software integration or an RSVPing mechanism, I could see it being very useful. For links maybe not as much, but I’m sure some social bookmark tie-ins would make it at least interesting (and I’m sure there’ll be Digg integration).

The interface looks a lot like Twitterific to me, and I think it could be extremely appealing to people who are addicted to Facebook feeds (i.e. everyone I know).

It doesn't seem like anything particularly ground-breaking, but the more I think about it the more exciting it seems. If asking people to a spur-of-the-moment happy hour (and getting a headcount for it) is as simple as using Twitterific — that is, you hit a hotkey, type in a message and hit send — it could be genuinely useful. It's much too early to say for sure, of course, but it all strikes me as being very promising.

One criticism, though: he should've named it pwnce.

FOR THE GEEKS: This could also make for an even better bareknuckle cage match with Twitter than I first thought: they're running their website on Django, a Python framework created by Adrian Holovaty. Twitter's website, on the other hand, is the web's biggest Ruby On Rails application, and has become well-known for being at the forefront of figuring out how to make RoR scale — this is the sort of stuff Al3x works on (and gets interviewed about) on a day to day basis. RoR-haters frequently point to Django as a comparable framework that doesn't have Rails' efficiency problems. So! This will be a nice head-to-head matchup of competing technologies.

Of course, there's no clear indication that Pownce's messaging engine is also written in Python (Twitter's is written in Ruby). And there's also no real proof that they'll be a direct competitor to Twitter, in that we don't know whether Pownce will integrate with IM, SMS and other interfaces the way Twitter does (that could ultimately be a boon to them, though, since they won't have to burn through capital buying everyone free SMSes).