Kevin Rose, founder of popular social news site Digg.com, has successfully launched his brand new venture that seems about as boring and/or creepy as Gmail: Pownce. So what is Pownce? According to the site it is a� “way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends.” That sounds more like a file-sharing system than the basis for a community. Moreover, they will “run some small advertisements in your list of notes” which sounds a lot like GMail., which crawls through emails to� find keywords then uses those to display ads on your� GMail pages.� Perhaps the criticisms of the online Digg community caused this shift� to a more one-on-one format, but Pownce doesn’t fundamentally sound like a new kind of online community. Not yet, anyway. We have beta invites, but we’re not going to use them.

Update: here is a hilarious and heated exchange that actually proves the point: Pownce is using user content to determine ads.

Tidbit:� also fascinating is the fact that when Rose and company� launched the site they did so without any search engine optimization - so a Google search for Pownce yielded a boring World of Warcraft user profile. One might think that the head of one of the most popular online community sites in the world would have thought of that ahead of time!