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Of late I’ve blogged about how an event, service, blog, etc…can provide a place for visitors to interact, the most in vogue at the moment is a social network, eg. mowser service, mashable blog, reboot conference, Supernova conference (this is more of a lifestream for a conference, where visitors can leave messages, comment, add as a friends…all the network fun).

The latest Online Community Unconference 2007 has taken the social network concept one further by getting people to add their lifestream tidbits and then run some network analysis over it resulting in a matching service, which is ideal for like people in a conference environment.
The social network enables users to engage as usual, and top of it goes one further by matching people, why not!

This is all possible with IntroNetworks, see the post at Learning Alliances.

So many lifestream services of late, what about some of these do the same, eg. Wink could use its data visually by doing some like interests or content analysis and match people in a visual circle of connections of closeness.

Just came across a Tweet about a new service called Pownce, at a glance it looks like an IM social network, why not, it seems any service now has a social network around it, even startpages like PageFlakes are soon to be in the game, well speculated by RWW.

I started blogging about it and thought I’d better look at what others have already said about it, that means I have to open up my RSS Reader and click through everything.

It could be easier if my RSS Reader did clustering like a memetracker, see Feeds 2.0, FeedEye, Feedable.

Or at least if I could search in my RSS Reader.

My option is to use my personal megite memetracker or blogrovr.

Anyway, enough of that…

Mapping the Web describes Pownce very succinctly:

“They list four possible items that you can share: messages, links, files, and events. In addition, you have the flexibility to share these items with one person, a group, or your whole list. There is a web-based version, as well as a small, downloadable app.”

It seems it has micro-blogging within a social network like Twitter or Jaiku, with the added feature of sharing items…as of yet you can’t use Pownce with IM or SMS.

What a simple idea, basically GoogleTalk as a social network.

What about IM bookmarks…at the moment I search through Gmail for my chats, what if I could bookmark them for personal use, or select them as public.
The good thing about this is that the chat can be augmented by comments left at the bookmark, or perhaps even live chat for every bookmark.
Another convenient thing is that instead of cut and pasting a whole chat transcript in your blog post you can just point to the chat.

If there’s an email bookmark service why not IM chats?

Pownce is a great idea, bringing together the features of IM with micro-blogging, all within a social space, perfect to invite friends to an event…I wonder if it could be used with any IM client, then it would be really viral.

In similar news Hictu the IM status indicator social network crossed with presence blogging, now has audio and video posts…see my take on Twitter incorporating these features.

[ADDED 4/07/07: Pownce could surely be used in the enterprise context, I haven’t used it yet, but, if it were to be a mashup of IM and presence blogging then it would be very useful.

The ability to post presence to a closed group of people, and others to reply comments, so far this is what Jaiku offers, but Pownce further allows to post not just text, but events, links and files.

Posts to just your friends will not be seen by others when they look at your public stream, but if a friend looks at your public stream they may see posts that they are privy to.

In the end this is group IM chat and file sharing, which IM clients like GoogleTalk already offer, but with Pownce you have a public page.
Plus Pownce isn’t limited to just chat…IM requires you to formally ping particular people, ie. initiate a discussion, whereas Pownce is more about presence blogging, just post and others will see it, and of course you can chat with others just like IM, so it’s the best of both worlds.

I suppose the killer difference is that you can’t use an IM client like GoogleTalk to presence post “what your doing” to a public stream…with IM your communication has to be directed at someone, whereas with presence blogging, you are just posting in general.

Perhaps Pownce is similar to Google Groups, but using IM type discussion instead of a forum…it seems similar to Campfire, but this is incorrect as Pownce is from an individual centric perspective, whereas Google Groups is a set group of people, where you post to a communal space about a specific topic.

Perhaps that could be next with Pownce, choosing to send posts to a topic page.

Another thing would be to form a group or on-the-fly group chat, like Google Groups, so all posts could be seen by all members of the group, this would be like a group chat in GoogleTalk].