There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me