Webware

Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.

It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.

"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15," Culver wrote. "Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function...(you can) import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."

Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzzworthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share.

Additionally, we heard that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. This is, after all, not a great time to be raising money.

Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox. "We hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future," Six Apart's Chris Alden wrote on the company blog.

Pownce's two other co-founders, Rose and Daniel Burka, will become Six Apart "advisers."

Social-networking savant Flock has announced a re-branded version of its browser aimed at fashionistas. At the very least, it's aimed at people who like the color pink and lipstick marks on their advertising. Called Gloss, it's a pink-and-purple themed edition of Flock 1.2 that comes with fashion-related feeds and bookmarks pre-loaded.

The Gloss rebuild of Flock shows the pinker side of browsing.

(Credit: Flock, Inc.)

The list of baked-in feeds for the Windows-only Gloss includes Cosmopolitan, TMZ, Glam.com, PopSugar, and These Boots Are Made for Stalking.

Gloss is getting pimped as a "fun" version of Flock, although I could've sworn that Flock received the same PR campaign comparing it to Firefox. Either way, it's hard to argue with a browser that promotes itself as a place where, "Your friends are always there--just like celebrities in rehab." It's hard to argue, of course, because sometimes it's better to just walk away. Slowly. Beyond having the topical feeds included and the new color scheme, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to get Gloss.

Flock itself has also received a couple of upgrades. The Flock 2 beta (download for Windows and Mac) goes up another point, incorporating the Firefox 3.0.1 security patch along with other bug-fixes. The Flock people are promising a lengthy beta cycle, so expect there to be at least one more update.

The official version of Flock (download for Windows and Mac) also gets a bump up, addressing bugs and security holes fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.16. Again, no major roadwork going on here, but it's definitely a good idea to upgrade to ensure that old exploits don't cause you grief.

The latest Flock update for Windows and Mac introduces more services to its ever-growing list of options, as well as a battery of performance and stability enhancements.

Most notably, Pownce and Digg have been integrated as people services. If you're not familiar with the self-styled "social browser," this means that you can perform all Digg- and Pownce-related chores--sorry, that should be "tasks"--from within the browser's social-networking features. Support for AOL Webmail has also been added, letting you check that account as easily as your Gmail account.

There's still a long list of known bugs that Flock has documented as in need of a fix.

Since Flock is a fork of the Firefox code that's been around for about a year, it will be interesting to see if future Flock updates attempt to integrate any Firefox 3 improvements or if they're going to pick their own migration pattern.

This post was updated at 10:49 AM with comment from Ariel Waldman.

Some Web enthusiasts find microblogging service Twitter to be addictive because you can say absolutely anything you want--as long as it's 140 characters or less. So what happens when "saying anything" translates into harassment?

One avid Twitter user, Ariel Waldman, posted an entry Thursday on her personal blog, declaring that "Twitter refuses to uphold (its) terms of service."

She said she started receiving "multiple accounts of harassment" from another user of the microblogging service and that when she petitioned to Twitter's community manager, he opted to remove the Twitter posts in question from the site's "public timeline."

Waldman wasn't satisfied, especially when the harassment allegedly continued and grew worse into 2008. She wanted to see user account bans of those responsible, and despite insisting that the activity was in violation of Twitter's terms of service, Twitter executives--including CEO Jack Dorsey--repeatedly said it wasn't.

Some of the comments at issue were apparently posted through a site that allows users to post anonymous "tweets" to a central account, making it difficult to track them to a specific user.

Blogger Ariel Waldman spurred a lively debate when she claimed that Twitter didn't abide by its own terms of service. She said it refused to take down an account that harassed her.

(Credit: flickr.com/arielwaldman)

Waldman is hardly the average Twitter user. Well-known in geek circles, she's a "social-media insights consultant" who contributes to tech blog Engadget and runs her own site, Shake Well Before Use, about "art, advertising, sex, and technology."

In other words, in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity--and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary. If Lindsay Lohan took action every time Perez Hilton and his celebrity gossip brethren scrawled "slut" across pictures of her, her lawyer would be working overtime.

Waldman also works as the community manager at Pownce, one of Twitter's few rivals in the microblogging space, giving her a bit of a conflict of interest in the issue. But in a phone conversation with CNET News.com on Friday, she said that the issue (and discussion with Twitter employees) began before she was hired at Pownce, and that she is a part-time employee with no investment in the company.

Still, Twitter has some ostensible safeguards against abuse. The site's terms of service say users "must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate, or intimidate other Twitter users" and that the company "may, but have no obligation to, remove content and accounts containing content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene, or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property, or these terms of use."

The final response to Waldman's complaint from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone asserted that "Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content," and that "Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter, nor a crowd, would do well." Stone added that Twitter's team would continue talking about which situations were appropriate for account banning.

As Waldman pointed out, however, other online services, such as Flickr, Digg, and her employer are far less laissez-faire, banning accounts frequently. And she raised a legitimate concern when she said harassing messages are an issue for identity management in the chaotic muck of the Web.

"Anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity," Waldman wrote, "and Twitter won't execute any means of community management."

That goes back to whether Twitter is inherently for communication or community. There's no universal standard for terms of service across social-media sites, and most Web users would likely agree that there probably shouldn't be one. Different services attract different audiences and demographics, and have created different cultures, in effect.

If Twitter wants to take a more hands-off approach to situations like Waldman's, allowing some of the dialogue that a Digg or Flickr wouldn't, it would be putting itself in the league of say-anything forums like MetaFilter.

That would make the service look less wishy-washy with its "we'll review the situation" response, but at the same time, branding itself as a free-for-all outlet likely wouldn't help, as Twitter, reportedly having received fresh VC funding, attempts to gain more mainstream traction.

"It seems like that's where a lot of the disagreement is," Waldman said to CNET News.com. "Twitter's not wanting to take the job of policing and their users are used to being in communities where I guess they are a bit more policed."

Either way, what Waldman calls "community management" is something that Twitter has to sort out--fast. As Twitter breaks further out of Silicon Valley culture, the service will invariably have to deal with users who cry foul over far tamer situations. Much like its famous outages, which the site finally addressed in full this week, abuse and harassment is something that Twitter can't simply ignore.

I'm a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you're Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you'd like (I successfully added six).

Twhirl lets you add in your Pownce and Jaiku accounts to cross-post your Twitter messages to each service on the fly.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It's also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn't have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

The one crucial thing that's missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it's nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it's a one-way street. It's also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

Twhirl's been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you'll need the latest version of Adobe' AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.

Related: The many flavors of Twitter

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One thing Pownce is still missing after opening up earlier this week is a public feed. While the creators have hand-picked a selection of mostly San Francisco socialites for everyone to view on its main page, there's not a simple way to pull together some of the hottest activity on the site short of tapping into the API. An enterprising developer Bryan Pearson has done just that, creating Powncememe, a site that rates people's Pownce messages based on various characteristics including user ratings, the number of recipients, and replies from other users. When combined it's a fun way to see what's interesting on the service as a whole, including pictures and links.

Compared to TechMeme, it's certainly not as advanced, as it won't clump together similar stories or show which Powncer has the most clout, but it's not a bad place to find new people to befriend. Pearson is still fine-tuning the algorithm, and Version 2.0, which is due out later this year, is being written entirely in Ruby on Rails.

See also: RandomPownce

See interesting Pownce items, pulled together on one page (by robots).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pownce, the multifunction Web app for microblogging and file sharing is now open to every one, sans the need for invites. While invites have been made aplenty for every user to give out (I was getting about 10 a month), a few of you may remember a time when people were hawking invites on eBay for $10 a pop within a month of the service launching last June.

Events can be seen off the new public events page, and users can RSVP one of seven ways.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Besides opening up to everyone, there are some new features built in to entice members to interact with one another. The first is an all new contact scooper that will let you search for people you're friends with either by name or pulling information from your Facebook, Flickr, Digg, IM, and Web e-mail accounts. Many of the options don't even require a login, just a user name.

Additionally, the service is now up playing its events section, giving it a dedicated public page and adding subscription links for iCal and Google Calendar (although I couldn't get these links to work). Each event also gets its own page that includes over half a dozen RSVP responses to denote your attendance and user comments to chat with other attendees or ask questions to the event's creator. It's a far cry from dedicated invitation services like Evite or MyPunchBowl, but it's far improved from its previous iteration.

Not to be left out, all of these new features have made their way over to the desktop app that runs on the Adobe Air platform. Users can now directly reply to one another similar to some of the desktop Twitter tools have offered. It's not a full fledged IM service, but if two users are sending one another private messages via the app, it's pretty close.

I'm still on the fence about the usefulness of Pownce. I dig the design and community, but I've already invested myself in Facebook and Twitter enough to not want to add another service to my daily routine. I also rarely have the need to share files that fit Pownce's 10 and 100MB models for free and paid pro plan users. That being said, Pownce has Twitter beat on the feature list right now, and if that's where my Twitter friends end up, so will I.

While there's still not a short code service to send in Pownce updates from your mobile phone, yesterday the service quietly rolled out a new mobile interface (m.Pownce.com) to let members both post and browse Pownce updates, including files. While I couldn't manage to get any sort of attachment to load, the interface itself is a big step up from having to load the entire page--especially on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices; however, iPhone users are getting the best end of the deal as the site seems designed specifically for fingers and the large, portrait screen.

Ideally, I'd like to see Pownce make use of its file-sharing roots and make a Java or Windows Mobile app that lets users share their saved media from their phone. Services like Seesmic and Utterz are pushing the boundaries of the types of media people are making use of.

[Via Digg]

Facebook has several layers of functionality that make it worth using, but my favorite is the once-controversial news feed. Why? I simply don't have time to check each of my friend's profiles for what's new, and the feed does a pretty great job at that without all the legwork or annoying e-mail notifications. FriendFeed is a new service that takes the idea of a news feed and extends it beyond the social network into other social services you're a part of. There are more than 20 to pick and choose from, including social news services like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, along with microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.

Keep track of all the feeds for all your friends with FriendFeed.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

By adding all these services to your FriendFeed, you're essentially creating another social networking profile--but this is a little different. It's almost like a digital identity, or your very own "about" page of services you use. Others can then easily subscribe to your FriendFeed and get the benefit of all of your online activity in one place. Likewise you can subscribe to theirs with one click, and track all the online activity they've made publicly available.

So what's the big deal about this service? It's really not a new idea--other services like Readr, Spokeo, Jaiku (which is incidentally one of the included feeds) let you do this with all sorts of social feeds, and 8hands, which we looked at back in late April, does it on your desktop with IM to boot. There's also the recently launched Plaxo Pulse (review), which adds some contact management into the mix as well. So to answer my original question, the most exciting part is the group of folks behind it, which consists of four ex-Google employees who have worked on big projects like Google Maps, Groups, and Gmail. That and it's super simple to use--you just need to copy and paste a few URLs, and plug in your username.

For widget junkies, there are two ways to extend your FriendFeed master feed to other platforms, including a Facebook app (which beats installing apps for each social service), along with a Javascript version you can embed on any old blog or Web site.

The service is in private beta with plans to open up to everyone in the "next month or so."