The founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, has finally made it known the secret project he’s been working on for a few months – he’s announced Pownce on his Tumblr blog. Pownce is a new entry in instant messaging with an emphasis on sharing things with multiple people easily.

So while Pownce isn’t exactly like the Twitter rival I was expecting, it’s not entirely different either. Instead of sharing your status with multiple people as you do on Twitter, you’re sharing either links, files, or events. Interestingly enough, the service Pownce perhaps most reminds me of is (the aforementioned) Tumblr. The pre-defined message types and overall look and feel definitely give me the vibe of a kind of instant-Tumblr service.

Twitter currently allows you to share links also but in my opinion it doesn’t do that good of a job of handling them as they are simply a part of your status update – Pownce should do a much better job in this regard, just as Tumblr does…

Events seems to be an interesting choice for an instant service since, one would imagine, the event won’t be taking place instantaneously after the announcement. It would be nice to get an instant RSVP for an invite, but it also could put a lot of pressure on invitees by putting them on the spot for an answer and possible excuse.

File sharing would seem to be the key ingredient here, and if it works well, it should be a nice way to share a file with multiple people quickly. One question on that would be if people are willing to sign onto to a website every single time just to share those files or if they will use the stand-alone app which words via Apollo Air – in which case how many IM clients will users want to have open?

It’s hard to say much more about Pownce without actually using it (it’s currently invite-only), but the site does look nice. Does the world need another IM service? Probably not, but than again does the world need 95% of the things created on the Internet everyday? No. I’m personally a big fan of Tumblr, so taking some ideas from there into the IM realm seem like a pretty good idea.

Pownce has Kevin Rose’s (Digg’s) star power behind it, so it certainly has a chance to make some waves. If nothing else it’s another entry in the potential ever-growing acquisition field for one of the big boys.