Pownce now supports UTF-8, which means you can now post Pownce notes in just about any language! We already have Powncers in 219 countries (China, Germany, France and Brazil among the largest percentage of non-English speaking so far).  We’re really excited and eager to see the global community grow even more. Be sure to check out the public notes page to see what people are posting on Pownce from across the world!

• Embedded media. Images, videos, audio files, and now Digg stories will appear inline!
• Pagination. See lots of notes going back in time.
• Favorite notes! Want to bookmark a note for later reference? No problem, just click the heart icon.
• Manage friends. See your friends and manage friend requests. This even has a friend search!
• Notification alerts. Get notified of new notes with audio alerts.
• Simpler Interface. The new UI is more native and generally more clean and simple.

Jon Rohan, a member of the Pownce community, began development of an alternative application, called PownceMonkey several months ago and we loved it. We approached Jon and asked him to collaborate on the next version of the Pownce app with us and thankfully he agreed! Jon rocks and we’re extremely pleased with how this version has turned out.

As you’ll notice, the application is currently in ‘Alpha’, which means we know there are some bugs in it that need to be worked out and we’d appreciate your help identifying and fixing those. We also have more functionality that we want to build into the app, but we figured this was a good time to send the software out into the real world and get your feedback to help developing it further.

If you haven’t used the Pownce desktop application before, the big advantage is that you’ll automatically know when new stuff gets posted to you and you can respond right away. This means you can have more real-time communication around the stuff you’re sharing with your friends.

Download it today!

The Pownce iPhone/iPod touch app lets you get all the latest notes from your friends right away on your mobile device. You can also send messages, links, events and photos.

My favorite thing about the iPhone version is that you can instantly take a photo from your phone and send it to all your friends!

Pownce developer Mike Malone has been working on this application for awhile now and its great to be able to share it with the Pownce community. Go ahead and download it today and start sending stuff to your friends!

PostRank is an engagement-ranking system that looks at any kind of online content, from blog posts to news stories, and has today announced integration with Pownce! Listed as a data source, Pownce will serve as a form of measuring the types and frequency of an audience’s interaction with online content for PostRank to analyze. This information is pulled from our open API.

To view more examples of how people are using the Pownce API, visit our featured apps page.

We’re very excited about our own Leah Culver being featured on the cover of the July/August issue of Technology Review! Published by MIT, the article reviews the Ten Web Startups to Watch, listing Pownce as one of the top ten up-and-comers. Also, check out what Leah and technology innovators had to say about the future of the web. Congrats, Leah!

Previously: Veronica Belmont gives Pownce the thumbs-up in her list of top 10 up-and-coming web apps.

Update: This was not a security issue, but rather a note filtering problem. Only public notes were affected and Pownce users do not need to update any account information. Again, we’re very sorry.

We were originally only going to have one winner, but in the end we thought three would be even better. Powncers FierceDeityLink1, lfcfan, and Cwluc take home the gold! Er, I mean they won either a free pro account or a tshirt… their call. The winning entries are outlined in red in the gallery below.

As some of you know, we’ve also been experiencing some performance problems on the website over this past week. The issues have been especially affecting our most prolific (aka awesome) Powncers. Rest assured, we’re keenly aware of how frustrating this is. We’ve heard from you very clearly and these performance issues also affect our accounts. There are some short term fixes we’re working on, but to get the site performing as well as we would like will also take some changes that will take longer to complete. Performance is a high priority for us and we want you to know that we’re focusing on these issues.

Thanks for your patience and good luck in the contest!

Join the Pownce team for our first birthday since our launch! We’ve had an exciting year and we want to celebrate it with all our friends :)

To RSVP to get in, you *must* post a reply to http://pownce.com/ariel/notes/2287243/

What: Pownce 1 Year Anniversary Party!

Where: Justin.tv HQ, 36 Clyde St., San Francisco, CA 94107

When: Fri, June 27 2008 at 7 p.m.

We’ll be providing beer, but feel free to BYOB if you’re pickier than us.
This event is 21+.

We can’t wait to see all of you there!

We also provided more control over who can download audio files that you share with the public. You can access these new settings by going to your settings when logged in to your account.

In addition, we’re happy to announce that we’ve increased the base file size limit for all Powncers from 10MB to 100MB! We greatly appreciate the support we’ve received from our Pro members, so we’re also increasing the file size limit to 250MB for free for all the Pros. We’re really excited about these new features and hope you are too!