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.

On the same day we posted about Twitter passing on an acquisition deal with Facebook, we got official confirmation that Twitter has acquired a different company. On the Twitter blog, CEO Ev Williams announced that Twitter has acquired the assets of Values of n, which includes web-projects I Want Sandy and stikkit, but the most important acquisition is the engineer behind them, Rael Dornfest.

Rael has served as the Chief Technology Officer at O’Reilly Media and is well known for his work on RSS. Over the last couple of months he has been working with the Twitter team as a consultant and will be officially joining the User Experience Group at Twitter as an engineer.

This may also be a unique situation for Twitter. Rael has been openly welcomed to the team and he has stated that they work incredibly well together. However, as Rael responded to congratulatory tweets, he has confirmed he will be working remotely in Portland (see tweets here and here).

Sadly, with this acquisition I Want Sandy and stikkit will be closing shop on December 8th at the close of the business day. Both blog posts from Ev and Rael hint that this is not the end for the services. Their future is unclear at this time, but I would expect aspects of each of the services to be slowly integrated into Twitter over time as the team continues to develop their product and search for a business model (perhaps even that one that includes charging businesses to use it and adding features to improve organization and productivity).

Congrats to the Twitter team and Rael!

As reported by Kara Swisher on All Things Digital, talks between Facebook and Twitter over an acquisition deal have ended and no agreement has been reached. Sources say “Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock,” but talks broke down “over price and the typical concerns about integration and costs.”

Facebook Brought Twitter to the Table, But Couldn’t Hold On

The talks had been initiated between the two companies by Facebook in mid-October, with top execs and investors all involved in discussions about bringing the two together. Other reasons the deal was turned down are attributed to feelings from Twitter’s investors that “the startup should still take a shot at building its revenues as well as it had done at building its growth.”

Similar to Their Extraordinary Growth, Investors Hope the Same can be True of Future Twitter Revenues

Though Twitter experienced many infrastructure problems earlier this summer, recent months have seen Twitter shining. New numbers in the article state Twitter having “about six million registrations, as reported in October, up 600 percent over the last year.” These new numbers are actually twice those of what bloggers and consultants have been quoting for the past several months.

Lack of Revenues was a Factor in the Deal

The problem of Twitter not having any current revenues was also an issue for Facebook. Despite operating for two years with $20 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions and well-known Silicon Valley figures such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, Twitter has yet to turn out a business model. They’ve talked about paid corporate accounts and an ad-supported version, but nothing official has been released.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m glad Twitter passed on the deal. For me, Facebook and Twitter are two very different beasts. Although Facebook has tried to implement microblogging into its feature set (with it’s own Status Updates), it still hasn’t quite captured the more simplistic essense of microblogging. In a way, Facebook feels more like FriendFeed, a constant stream of activity from friends and contacts. Twitter and microblogging are much more streamlined and simplistic.

Here’s to hoping Twitter is able to find a business model that lets them keep it that way.