PowncePownce is “a way to send stuff to your friends.” It’s a one-to-many “social messaging” application like Twitter, but it packs a bunch of additional features (full review). Backed by Digg.com founder and web wunderkind Kevin Rose, Pownce is a high visibility project with a good chance of success. The site held up fairly well to a barrage of traffic after its launch, which made me wonder what makes it tick. Lead developer Leah Culver was kind enough to answer some questions via email.

Where Pownce came from

After several Java (J2EE) development jobs Leah Culver wanted to learn a new programming language. Following a friend’s suggestion, she began “playing around” with a Python Web framework called Django last January. Pownce began as a hobby project, a way for Leah to learn Django. During time off from her day job as the host of Wink!, a webcast produced by webshots, Leah began building an application that would allow her to send messages and share media with her friends.

After discussing her ideas with friends Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose, the trio discovered they had complementary skill sets and a common goal — to start a(nother) successful online venture. They figured that together they could build something pretty cool, and formed Pownce’s parent company, Megatechtronium, Inc. Culver became the project’s lead developer, and the company’s sole full-time employee in March.

While Culver wrote code Daniel Burka, a partner at design company silverorange and creative director at digg.com, designed the Pownce user interface. As uberblogger Robert Scoble puts it, “the designer who worked on Pownce is awesome. Love the look of Pownce…”

The three decided that a desktop application would be a nice addition to Pownce. They recruited the fourth, and final member of the team, Shawn Allen, who created the Pownce desktop application and is responsible for the Pownce API (which is currently not available to third-party developers).

What Pownce is made of

Pownce is built on a variation of the LAMP stack: Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python. But the site uses a number of less mainstream technologies to speed up development, improve performance, and reduce costs.

Django

Django is “a high-level Python Web framework that encourage rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.” In other words, it helps you build high-performance, well designed Web applications quickly. The framework consists of:

  • An object-relational mapper
  • Template and cache systems
  • An automatically generated admin interface
  • An elegant regular expression based URL dispatcher
  • Full support for multiple-language applications and internationalization

In our email conversation, Culver had nothing but good things to say about the framework. She says, “I had [Django’s] tutorial application up and running in about an hour. I love the documentation for Django and the automatically generated admin section. Choosing Python was a result of choosing Django and I’m certainly glad that Django is Python based, since Python also has good documentation and great community”

Perlbal

Perlbal is a Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server. It’s used by large websites like LiveJournal and TypePad to distribute traffic across a number of backend servers. Pownce is currently distributed across about five servers, but Culver says “that’s likely to change at any time.”

Perlbal, together with a Memcached-based caching system, have proven remarkably resilient for the young site. Culver says, “the main splash page and all the static pages… were caching as soon as [Pownce] launced.” Other parts of the site are cached as well, “we really wanted our main pages to load quickly,” she said, “we knew about the Digg effect.”

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 provides “a simple web service interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.” The minimalist interface allows developers to write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. You pay only for what you use, and there is no minimum fee.

Pownce uses the service to host file uploads, up to 10MB for normal users and 100MB for pro accounts. Culver says, “we were pleasantly surprised with how inexpensive Amazon S3 has been and it’s been working really well for us so far.” If you’re thinking about using Amazon S3 for your own project, you might be interested in the AWS Cost Calculator, which can help you estimate what the service will cost.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

Adobe AIR (formerly code-named Apollo) is a cross-platform runtime that allows you to build rich Internet applications using existing web technologies like HTML, Javascript, Ajax, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Flex.

Sounds cool, but the runtime is still in public beta and has not been widely adopted. The Pownce download page reads “Don’t know if you have it? If you’re not sure, you probably don’t have it installed, so go ahead and install it now.” The AIR platform also faces stiff competition from Microsoft Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX. That said, Adobe’s offering does have first-mover’s advantage. And Adobe has a lot of pull amongst developers, considering the ubiquity of Flash.

Where Pownce is going

Though there’s no badge (it’s too cliche), Pownce is technically in public beta. So you can be sure that bugs will be fixed, features will be added, and things will change over time. For example, they just added a favicon less than 48 hours ago, and RSS feeds are now available for a user’s public notes (they weren’t initially).

Some people might be offended by what they perceive as lazy programmers and buggy sites, but the trend in Web development seems to be to release early, then iterate. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing — there’s no better way to find a bug than to open your doors to thousands of “beta testers.” An early look at the application has benefits for users too. For example, Kevin Rose seems genuinely interested in user feedback, which might surprise some regular Digg users.

A lot of people are wondering whether Pownce will have an API anytime soon. I asked Culver, and she said “I’m really glad that so many developers want to hack on Pownce. We’re still working out the details of having a real open API. We’d like to be more stable before developers start using it.” So, sounds like you better not hold your breath, but that’s better than what she told Scoble. Maybe they really are listening.


Though she couldn’t give exact numbers, Culver said that “it’s fairly accurate to say that registration is growing exponentially.” And judging from the Alexa traffic stats, she’s not exaggerating. If they can sustain this rapid pace, they might actually be able to reach the critical mass required to draw a non-geek audience and really become popular.