The Pownce Blog was headlined today with news that is sure to shake up the microblogging world. Pownce employees Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be heading to Six Apart, a company specializing in blogging tools and personalized services to help bloggers become successful. Due to this purchase, Pownce will be shutting down its services effective December 15, 2008.
Pownce was originally created by the likes of Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka (both of Digg), and Leah Culver. Even though it offered sharing beyond text such as emeddable images, videos, links, and mp3s, Pownce couldn’t get a major foothold in the microblogging space. This all went on at the same time that Twitter’s traffic skyrocketed. Pownce was highly regarded by some and was considered to be the second most popular microblogging service, only behind Twitter.
Culver, Malone, and the Pownce technology will be heading to Six Apart while Rose and Burka will become advisers. It’s been made clear that Pownce, in its current manifestation, will not be part of the new lineup, but there certainly will be something similar to it. Six Apart is the company behind products such as MovableType, TypePad, and Vox. As a company that seems hellbent on ease of use, it only makes sense to add a microblogging platform like Pownce to its already impressive lineup of products.
If you’re concerned about your Pownce data going away, you can generate an export file to capture all that data. You can then import it to Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. As for those who paid for a Pro account, there’s no word yet on what’s going to happen to that.
From the Six Apart blog: "For the Pownce Pro users, we would like to offer you a free TypePad account for a year." Burned!
It's interesting to see Six Apart adding a microblogging service to their more general blogging products, but I'm not sure cashing in a "pro" microblogging account for a free Typepad blog is what most people had in mind, especially if many of them maintain (macro)blogs outside of their microblogging activities. I'm curious as to how everything will shake out with this purchase, as it's already starting out differently than when Google bought Jaiku, which seemed to have little impact on the users.
Also, with Six Apart acquiring it's own microblogging platform, where does that leave WordPress? Do they need to find a platform of their own? Could we finally see an integration between comments on blogs and comments made on microblogging services? WordPress has been on a buying streak lately, but I'm not sure there's another viable platform for them to scoop up right now.
Reply · PermalinkI guess that explains why Pownce never responded to my support inquiries including an inquiry to change my username. In some way I am glad to not have to worry about another microblogging platform :-)
In regards to WordPress there is always BuddyPress and they already have IntenseDebate which may play a role in that space.
Reply · PermalinkI'm not sure if this is a big deal for Wordpress. However if I had my own microblog platform I would be wondering what this meant for me.
Pownce had a rockstart team, great design, ease of use with a nice balance of features and a (working?) business model. Is closing the doors a sign that it did something right or something wrong?
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