• The New York Times, Monday, July 30, 2007 10:46 AM

Among the tech elite, Pownce, the latest darling of the social networking industry, has more cachet than Facebook. You need an invite, that's why. Within 10 days of announcing that invitations were required to join this latest endeavor from Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, invites were selling on eBay for as much as $10.

Some believe Pownce represents social networking 2.0 because it encourages file-sharing between friends, which while popular, has never been the cornerstone of MySpace or Facebook. The combination of private messaging and file-sharing makes Pownce novel.

A lot of the buzz stems from the fact that Kevin Rose produced it, and it's invite-only. APownce is innovative in the sense that messaging is more private and covers many user outlets, like text messaging. But the file-sharing, most of which occurs on public sites and can be easily monitored by media companies, is "powerfully disruptive." File-sharing on Pownce, if the site became widespread, would be difficult to police. Both users and the site could easily be threatened into compliance through litigation. Did Rose chose the name to bait media companies?

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