Pownce opens file sharing to the public with larger sizes to boot

We talk about Twitter here a lot, but don’t often talk about one of its micro-messaging rivals, Pownce. That is quite simply because Pownce is not as popular as Twitter. Tonight however the service has rolled out two significant updates that may not close the popularity gap, but will make Pownce more useful: public file sharing and increased file sizes.

You can now use your Pownce account to share files with anyone on the Internet, not just other Pownce users. These files can now be up to 100 megabytes in size (up from 10 MB) for free account holders and up to 250 MB for ‘Pro’ accounts.

I sometimes use Pownce — when Twitter is down, which as you may know is quite a bit, despite reports to the contrary. However, Pownce is actually quite a useful service. It has features such embeddable photos, videos and mp3 music file sharing that make it much more dynamic than Twitter’s text-only route. It also handles the sharing of links much better than Twitter as it has a separate box in which to put them (on Twitter, links are included in your 140 character limit).

Posting events is another strength of the service. And of course, sharing files. Here is a test one that I uploaded (one of the new songs that Nine Inch Nails recently gave away for free on the Internet).

Pownce also has a native mobile interface that runs circles around Twitter’s native mobile version (as I’ve complained about before). There are certainly reasons to use Pownce even if you use Twitter, public file sharing just gives you another.

The San Francisco-based Pownce is the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen. Pownce has a more direct rival for sharing media files in Fyreball, a service we recently profiled here.

You can find me on Pownce here – warning: I like to share the occasional 80s music video