Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software

Social news service Reddit is about to get a whole lot more social, if that’s possible. Like other popular social news/link web sites including Digg and StumbleUpon, Reddit features a long list of user-submitted links to articles, images, videos, and pretty much anything anybody ever thought was useful. Users can vote stories up or down and the top stories are featured on the front page.

It’s pretty tough to get a story on the front page of Reddit, but the service offers a number of subcategories, which it calls subreddits. So while the link you submitted with a picture of an entire Star Wars battle scene constructed of Legos might not make the front page of Reddit Proper, you might be able to hit the front page of legos.reddit.com. You know, if that particular subreddit existed.

And pretty soon it might. Reddit has announced the launch of a build your own subreddit feature. Users will be able to create public, restricted, or private reddits that can be shared with the whole world or just a small group of friends. The service is in private beta right now, but should be made publicly available within a week or so. In the meantime, you can apply for the private beta by sending an email to feedback at reddit.com with the subject “omg me please.” Seriously, that’s how you apply.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Internet, News, Web services, VoIP, Social Software

As of 12 AM PST, Pownce, the Twitter-esque social messaging tool created by Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka and Leah Culver, leaves private beta and becomes open to the public. Pownce became open to a limited group of users in June of 2007 and has thus far amassed 150,000 users.

Even though the developer has repeatedly claimed that Pownce is “not a Twitter clone,” it is hard to look at the two services and not see the similarities. Both offer a way to send a message to a massive group of people at the same time and have similar friend/follower structures.

The differences are that while Twitter can be highly integrated with mobile devices and SMS messaging, Pownce can only be used from the web site or the Adobe AIR client. However, Pownce allows user the ability to share files (up to 10 MB for free users, 100 MB for Premium users), invitations and set-up personalized groups. When Pownce goes live, it will also make it simple to import friends from services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pownce’s Main Messaging Page

Several of us here at DownloadSquad have been playing with Pownce on and off for quite some time, and while we think the service show considerable promise, Twitter still has our heart. The inability to use Pownce from an IM client or SMS outweigh the benefits of being able to share a file (we prefer e-mail or a link to a service like box.net anyway) or send out a group invitation. We do like the grouping feature and really wish that Twitter would implement somethign similar.

In the end, for us, it will all come down to what service our friends are using. As of right now, all of our friends are on Twitter; however, now that Pownce is open to the public, that could change. Check out Pownce and tell us what you think.

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