There’s been a lot of buzz about Pownce, the new "way to send stuff to your friends". The most insightful thoughts are here, the declaration that "Pownce is competing with 37Signals, not Twitter!".
Without getting into an overly-typed manifesto, the most useful thing you can do when thinking about Pownce and other social networking applications is to be generic rather than specific.
Go from "send cat pics from dorm room in New Haven to mom in Dallas" to "send any file to anyone from anywhere". That way it’s a short step into "send updated machine maintenance report from factory in Korea to corporate headquarters in Oklahoma". Suddenly it’s not silly anymore.
Any application that has pop-culture popularity also has enterprise utility. Way beyond "blogs for business".
So anyway I’ve been sitting on Pownce for a while (thanks, Paul!), trying to figure out how to use it. I use Twitter for my NYT Anonymity Project (explication) rather than micro-updates on how my day’s going. Again, taking it from the personal (which I’ve actually grown to appreciate, because you can gain insight into friends & acquaintances, leading to more intimacy and connection w/ hardly any work) to the generic (RSS feed for things that get updated) and then back to the specific for a more useful utility (show all reasons why anonymity was granted to a source in the NYT).
It’s the file sharing feature of Pownce that is most appealing to me. For the last couple years I’ve kept a PDF collection on my desktop. A few times per month a really important document is published that is best viewed (or only available) in its native format– the National Intelligence Estimate, the Family Secrets Indictment, stuff like that. I download these documents and save them so I can get at them later.
So there you have it– Pownce is now my online PDF Collection, where you can be up-to-date on all the latest info in your least favorite portable document format.