This is a guest post that has been written by Max Hawkins, of TechRave, currently standing in as admin this week while David is away.

Initially, Pownce looked to me like one of those things I wouldn’t really care about, and throw to the side while I concentrated on other websites that took my fancy. But after discovering Invite Share yesterday, and very quickly getting (15 minutes after asking for one!) an invitation to Pownce, I registered, logged in, and was VERY surprised at how great it actually was.

First off, the sites design is fantastic. It is clean, sleek and everything is easy to read. But that is just the home page. Logging in reveals much, much more goodness.

Your personal page is aesthetically pleasing, with your description, invites, and friends down the left, your message/file/event text box down the middle, and various other options, such as filters (for seeing messages, files, replies etc) down the right. There is also a small box indicating things that you should do once you get your Pownce account up and running.

From this panel, you can post messages, files, links and events. A great feature of this is the ability to make what you post public, only for your friends, or only for a certain friend. Another neat feature is being able to put different friends in sets, so you can send your message to some friends, but not all. This provides a massive improvement over Twitter, where everything is public, and everyone will see your message, no matter what. This is what gives Pownce the cutting edge over Twitter.

The settings are quite fully featured all ready, and you have a lot of customization over what you can do with your account. Basic things such as selecting what notifications you want to receive are standard, as well as strong privacy controls. You can control who sees your email address, gender, age and so forth through here, and you also have a lot of control over these. Changing the theme is also an option, but at the moment, there are only four available to select from. Until great demand urges for more, these themes are pretty nice anyway, and I like the one I am currently using, a sort of dark brown type thing.

Also available is the desktop version of Pownce, which requires Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which makes it possible for you to post messages and files without being restricted to the browser. Screenshot below.

Hold on, nothing is that good? Well, there is a slightly bad thing about Pownce. You can only upload files of 10mb or less. Anything more up to 100mb, you will need to get a pro account, which comes in at a low price of $20 (£10) a year. Not bad really. I’d maybe wait until they have the system a little more live maybe until you go and buy, just so all the bugs can be ironed out from any testing that is left. Still, $20 isn’t much. Certainly is an affordable price for a year anyhow. And hey, they need money for hosting…

Currently, not much has really been happening on Pownce for me yet, but with offer of some free invites, I am sure some of you will want to be my friend . There are 5 to be grabbed now, as Andrew Sommerich has already snagged one. Maybe if you ask him nicely! And also come and visit me on my Pownce profile.

Anyway, to sum it all up, Pownce is the Twitter Killer. As soon as we can introduce Twitter junkies to this, they won’t want to turn back. Twitter will be out of business before they know it….