Coming from the metaphorical lips of Kevin Rose himself, Pownce announced its super-alpha mobile version of Pownce today, available for mobile browsing at mobile.pownce.com.  I think this is an interesting development, given that one of the biggest pluses for Twitter has been the ability to message your crowd “off-line”, enabling all kinds of interesting uses, including the ability to broadcast live updates of events as they happen.  Although a lot of Twitter content *is* of the “my cat’s breath smells like cat food” variety, the ability to engage in your community offline — both as a contributer and a reader — allows for the potential for some very smart and very important real-time information to go back and forth, whether it be a local emergency, weather changes, and so on.

By bringing Pownce “offline”, that is, not being tethered to a machine to do your … em … “powncing”, pownce will also be able to enter the same space as Twitter.

Sort of.

After all, in its current incarnation, Pownce will only be able to be viewed via mobile browser.  While such a site is still available for Twitter, we shouldn’t forget that many people use the SMS function of their phones to Twit away.  I suspect a great deal more people have phones that enabled for SMS than, say web browsing — although early adopters being early adopters, this proportion of folks who are *also* interested in Pownce and Twitter are likely to be much more equal than “normal” folks.

(just like more of them will also own iPhones and use Gmail, I’m sure).

[And following the line as from the above, in an emergency (like a catastrophic emergency), sending messages via SMS may be (this is total conjecture) more efficient and use less data than, say web browsing].