The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.
The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.
This is the second move where well known innovators have taken their technology and brains to a bigger company and shuttered their startup that we've reported on in a week. Last week open source star Rael Dornfest sold his personal assistant startup Sandy to Twitter.
Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.
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Was never a big fan of their service, but I'm sure they will come up with something bigger in the future. Best of luck!
Posted by: Dealyzer | December 1, 2008 1:03 PM
"Hire track" is great. And it says what it really is. RRW HireTrack. There. Never let it be said I didn't pull my weight.
Posted by: Curt Hopkins | December 1, 2008 2:20 PM
Pownce users who want to continue to share multimedia after the shutdown should try Utterli (www.utterli.com) - it allows anyone to share voice, video, pictures, and text from cell or desktop and cross post to all major blogs and social network pages.
Posted by: Michael Bayer | December 1, 2008 2:20 PM
it seems that SixApart is going to incorporate Pownce’s microblogging technology into its blogging platforms. It makes a lot of sense for SixApart to buy a microblogging platform, since microblogging is one of the faster growing parts of the “social media ecosystem.”
Posted by: New features in Google Maps for mobile | December 2, 2008 5:40 AM
the real question is, who's next?
Web of the Living Dead -- http://blogs.computerworld.com/web_20_dead_pool
cheers,
dt
Posted by: dantynan | December 2, 2008 8:18 AM
I never saw SSL on pownce. I wasn't sure how anything going to that service was secure so I never really used it. No response from their contact us button or whatever either. Ultimately I didn't really care about their offering that much either. I found this cool alternative called "email" and "http links". Turned out to be pretty useful.
The article posted above makes a good point about Twitter. The emperor has no clothes, really. What's to stop Facebook from rolling out the status update into its own url. status.facebook.com?
Web 2.0 has been pretty disappointing in a lot of areas.
Posted by: Ivan | December 2, 2008 9:17 AM
I was not surprised it failed. i used it since day one. i liked it. but these are the main reasons why it failed:
1.-very very very late IE support (two months ago or so)
2.-It was plagued with development issues
3.-It had the slowest development pace ever
4.-Pownce Team was not very responsive (blog, replies, etc)
5.-It had a extremely mediocre AIR App
6.-it suffered bugs and downtimes frequently
7.-Site loaded slow most of the times.
8.-It was very Mac Centric and this alienated a lot of Windows Users (i know, because some told me so)
9.-Community was not very responsive or participative
10.-it suffered of a lot of spam users. (lots and lots)
11.-It lost most of its Top 1000 users to Plurk months ago
12.-It lacked true leadership and direction
How could it not fail?.
Thankfully you have 2 good choices to move to that are Pownce Like if you were a pownce user.
1.-Rejaw (this is where i moved to)
2.-Kwippy
Posted by: Avatar | December 2, 2008 11:37 PM