A former coworker recently sent me an invite to a new social networking site (for lack of a better genre-ism) called Pownce. Typically I am not a fan of social networking sites; I have never used MySpace or Twitter, and although I do have a Facebook account, I opened it as a joke. After reading up on the (short) history of Pownce though, I created an account to check it out.

The site has been developed mostly by Leah Culver, and has the backing of Digg creator Kevin Rose. As an aside, every time I see mention of Kevin Rose, or somebody like him — someone who has trumped technology in some way — there is always a wunder-adjective in the sentence. Wunderkind, wunderhacker, etc. The next time I see one of these words used I will figure out a way to transform the entire phrase into a human, and punch it in the face. Seriously.

With regard to the Pownce feature-set, I assume the basics apply to most other sites in this genre — i.e. you have your profile, settings, friends, and various options that go with all of that. The hook is that you can send different types of files to friends and groups of friends. That is a simplification, but nonetheless, that’s what you get.

One of the things that interested me the most is that the whole site is done using Django, a Python-based web application framework. Although the web development I do is in PHP, I’ve dabbled in Python from time to time, and in general am a fan of moving between languages. I’ve been meaning to start playing around with Ruby on Rails, and during my brief, late night research sessions, Django has come up several times as an alternative to RoR; there is an ongoing pissing contest between the two camps. From reading one of Leah’s posts, she doesn’t seem like much of a Rails fan.

The fluidity of the site, which makes heavy but subtle (tasteful) use of Javascript, is appealing and pleasing. It is served as XHTML 1.0 strict, but with a MIME type/subtype of text/html, and doesn’t validate. But that’s okay.

In the future, as I interact more with Pownce, I’ll post some updates.