Pownce opened up to the public today, including a new feature to allow you to find your friends on Pownce from your other online networks. I applaud the feature—anything to interconnect and lessen the redundancy in our social networks is grand—but I’ve got a suggestion for the implementation.

Months ago Pownce implemented the Other Profiles section of your page where you can include all your profiles on other social network sites. Leah Culver calls it profile bling, and Pownce is using the information to help you find friends from your other social networks who might be on Pownce too.

So, like I say, I think it’s terrific to make use of that information, but why not automate it? As it stands, if I want to find people on Pownce from my Flickr contacts, I have to enter my Flickr username, even though Pownce already knows it. That needs to be the case right now for things like Gmail contacts and Facebook friends as those need a login (Oauth, take me away!), but for public information like Flickr and Twitter, it’d be nice if Pownce made use of the information it already has in my profile for its search. Why enter my Flickr username if Pownce already knows it? [Update: Hey, cool. The day after I posted this Pownce started pre-filling the field with your username if you’ve registered a profile.]

Or, even better, how about when I go to find some friends, Pownce has already indexed the other social networks from my profile and listed the people who match up?