For those who have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks there is a new web 2.0 startup that has been unleashed upon you. So what’s new you ask ? Well it has the backing of Kevin Rose, the creator of the ever popular Digg. The name of the this new beast is Pownce. Yes. You can finally tell your girlfriend that you are going to Pownce her. Anyhow Pounce is like a more powerful instant messenger. Basically it allows you to send a message to any of your friends. Pownce also lets you send files to your friends. But the new twist is that you can form groups and send messages or files to all those belonging to a particular group! Now that’s something many people have been waiting for ever since the birth of the Internet!

Well not really, because we already had FTP, instant messengers, chat and recently Twitter. But none of them offered an integrated solution for sending your dear messages and files to groups of friends or associates. What if you wanted to send a song to just 10 friends from your list of 50 friends. Using any of the above services would require some work. Well for the lazy people now there is Pownce. The dwellers of the world wide web have reacted all very differently to this new service though. Some have like it, some hate it and some don’t really care.  I personally think that it is going to be a hit. It could even be popular in India if it could just catch on. In my opinion Pownce takes one of the main reasons (messaging) why Orkut is popular in India and puts it in a prettier package. So what’s not to like ? Well the problem is that almost every Indian is on Orkut and it will take some doing to get people to sign up for Pownce.

Nationality no bar - I have 6 invites left to give out. At the time of writing this post, Pownce is still in invites only sign up mode and so you need an invite to get in. So leave a comment if you need an invite. And also the Pownce blog tells that the invite mails mysteriously find their way into the invitees spam box so if that happens I can mail you the invitation code which you can use to sign-up. Cheers.