Pownce is competing with 37Signals, not Twitter!

The tubes have been abuzz with the Twitter/Pownce comparisons all week, and it's not like I didn't do my part, but I've come to the realization that Pownce has nothing on Twitter -- Pownce is gunning for Jason Fried.

In retrospect, I (and everybody else) made the comparison because, like Twitter, Pownce "streams" tiny bits of info from your friends in one nice, long, easily digestible list. One that's also kind of like Facebook. And not that different from my Flickr photostream. Or my Del.icio.us friends' links. Or any of the other myriad number of apps that have adopted a similar approach.

The "stream" -- let's call it that, because "river" just doesn't cut it -- is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It'll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places. Let's not confuse the functionality of a site with its overall purpose, in the same way we don't confuse Amazon with, say, Panic Software just because they both have a checkout process.

So, what's Pownce's purpose? And what's Twitter's, for that matter?

Based on what I've heard about Twitter's recent round of fundraising, which is rumored to be at a damn high valuation, as well as Ev's recent post about going big, I'd say that Twitter's making a huge infrastructure play. They want to undergird presence online, at least the short messaging part of it, and I'm guessing they'll eventually go even bigger than that. Twitter wants to be a utility, powering presence across a variety of devices, contexts, applications and services -- a huge engine moving the stream along. More power to them -- they've got the uptake and traction in that direction already, and when they make it they'll be in a highly defensible position, because real-time presence is (as their recent woes have demonstrated) *really freaking hard*.

And Pownce? Well, Pownce is a lightweight productivity app, built on top of the stream, and it has all the pluses and minuses of a productivity app (including that you can use it to share music with friends!) The Pownce kids have mentioned in a couple of places that the genesis of the application came from a desire for a more effective way to share files than IM and email, and though the app has obviously developed well past that initial point it still has deep roots down to that goal. Around the Satisfactory, we're talking about using it that way -- creating a Pownce set for everybody who's on the team to share, and then trading relevant work files with each other on it. Lightweight, streamed, persistent, scannable, understandable, simple. For our quick and agile approach to design and development, that's just about perfect.

So, who's the reigning king of lightweight productivity tools online, and who have we been using for that purpose up until now? 37Signals, makers of Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire, online apps designed to help people collaborate in a predominantly business but occasional personal setting.

37Signals has done a great job of remaking traditional enterprise tools in a lightweight, online, distributed environment, but they've been much slower (recent OpenID integration notwithstanding) and even somewhat disinclined to integrate the newer social tools that we're seeing deployed on sites like Pownce. Where 37Signals is slimming down bloated business software, which is a form of reinvention, Pownce is actually applying new ideas to traditional models and genuinely reinventing them in the process.

Not to mention the Pownce Pro pricing model. At $20/year, it's not a big-money model, and it'll definitely never get to Twitter-level valuations. That's a 37Signals sized pricing model right there.

So it's Pownce versus 37Signals, and what fun to see how this plays out, especially once Pownce starts finetuning their application (breaking out file types into individual categories, anyone?) I wouldn't even be surprised if eventually the streaming aspect of Pownce ends up being Twitter-powered. Because, did I mention, presence scaling is really hard?

Finally, if you had to set up two company founders in a cage match, which would you rather see -- Ev versus Kevin (eh), or Leah versus Jason? I rest my case.