VentureBeat

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

Jaiku, the popular service that lets you blast short blog updates to friends about you’re doing, has been snapped up by Google for an undisclosed amount.

Jaiku, based in Helsinki, Finland, has been a fierce rival to Twitter, a San Francisco company that is a favorite among the Silicon Valley digerati. During the summer, Jaiku picked up users almost as quickly as Twitter lost them, leaving the latter with only a marginal lead over Jaiku, according to comScore statistics.

Both services have enjoyed the success of a micro-blogging fad that caught on in spring. Jaiku today said it has closed its service to new users, noting that it wants to “focus on innovation instead of scaling.” According to Jaiku’s blog, Google engineers will be assisting the company in rebuilding the new service. Closing services to new users is something Google has done quite often. It did the same for a wiki company, Jotspot, for example.

The fact that Google appears to have bought Jaiku instead Twitter, whose founder also started up Google’s Blogger, is notable. Although Twitter was first to the micro-blogging scene, more than one startup has since encroached on its territory; besides Jaiku, the most successful example is Pownce, co-founded by Kevin Rose.

The possibility that Twitter turned down an offer from Google is cast into doubt by the traffic statistics mentioned above. A three-to-one lead held by Twitter over Jaiku in June had narrowed to a 37% lead by August, as Jaiku almost doubled its user base and Twitter shed close to 100,000 users (see graph at bottom).

A more likely scenario is that Twitter, which has raised venture capital funding from Charles River Ventures, Union Square Ventures and others, held out for a higher price from Google due to pressure from their VCs, making the search giant turn to a smaller competitor.

Twitter also has its own plans, with an open API already available to developers. Co-founder Biz Stone told us that projects on the API are bringing in ten to twenty times as much traffic as the site itself. “Momentum is strong right now and we’re really focused on building a company and culture around the idea of Twitter,” he said in an email, but also declined to comment on whether Google had approached Twitter.

A frequently asked questions page about the acquisition, put together by Jaiku, can be found here. Google’s post on the acquisition is here.

Update: The purchase price may have been $12 million, although our only source for this so far is Valleywag.