The Pownce development team may have moved over to Six Apart but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still listening to their community. From Get Satisfaction, Mike Malone announced that Pownce has made a temporary read-only version of public notes available.

The archive is in response to user requests and respect for permalinks on the web. This temporary solution will be available until at least January 1, 2009 and gives the Pownce community one last opportunity to archive parts of the site.

This archive doesn’t mean users will be able to download files or use the filtering features previously available on Pownce. Some notes may have links to download, login or sign up, but sadly its a trap. However, if you do find a good tune already uploaded on Pownce it should be playable.

Time is ticking, so if you haven’t done so already this may be your last chance to archive your notes on Pownce.

With Pownce shutting down tomorrow, today is your last chance to get your old notes exported. For those of you who want to take those notes with you to another service, we’ve compiled a list of microblogging platforms supporting Pownce import files.

• Rejaw started work on building functionality to import Pownce notes a few weeks ago and now users can do so with the account import tool.
• Utterli created a Pownce content importer to make transferring all text and multimedia content easy.
• Identi.ca is working to provide an import tool, but is still deciphering the file format.
• Soup, which bills itself as being even better than Pownce (courtesy of more customization and features), has a migration tool to import data.

Our recommendation would be to find which service fits you best and move all of your content there. And for the sake of followers everywhere, please don’t import your content to all of these sites. Rahsheen Porter (@rahsheen) recently gave his testimony for “Why you should Pownce on Rejaw,” citing it as the closet platform to Pownce.

Anyone else know of microblogging platforms with Pownce import abilities?

The Pownce community has been very vocal about Pownce closing their doors on December 15 (just a week away). When the announcement was first made by the development team they also announced an export function that would be allow their users to keep all of there notes and data after the service had been shut down. Since that initial post Pownce has had a number of stability issues, its users have been frequently greeted by Admiral Ackbar and complaints/questions about the exporter have been piling up. From my experience Pownce seems to be back to normal, however many users are still reporting that they have not received their exports.

Today Ariel Waldman posted a response on Get Satisfaction with more details and assurance that users will receive their export file. From her reply we know the exporter is running, it will provide a file with all of the users notes plus its replies, a separate file with all replies sent by the user, and will remain available until the 15th.

There is still no word on how long the export files should take to generate. After completing the request users are notified it will take a “few days” however some of the most vocal and active users have been waiting over a week and continue to grow frustrated as they count down to the 15th.

Last week Pownce announced they were closing their doors and left their user community nearly speechless. While many were trying to make sense of what was happening or figure out how to stay in touch with the community they had been building, one Pownce member decided to build on what Pownce had started and create a new platform, Topixz, to support Pownce’s somewhat stranded community.

Joel Weirauch (@JoelWeirauch), the purveyor of the project, first announced his intentions on Pownce and plans to open the new site for limited testing on December 15 (the day Pownce goes offline). Joel has been posting updates for Topicx on his blog and set up a Twitter account in the meantime to capture user feedback.

Here is a basic rundown on where Topicx stands so far:

Day 1 - I can’t design things to save my life, so if anyone would like to create a nice clean layout that can be easily customized by users, that would be excellent. 110 Pownce members [have] created an account [so far].

Day 2 - [A]s of right now, registered users have the ability to post notes, links and events. Just before pausing to write this post, I added the ability to reply to notes as well.

Day 3 and 4 - I’ve done quite a bit with the backend storing of notes this evening. If y’all think I made a lot of good progress over the course of the week, just wait till Sunday evening to see what I get done, because I predict it should be quite impressive.

Day 5 - I have friends, following and fans working about 98% completely. The note display page will have threaded comments as well, so rather than be limited to replying only to the parent note, you can reply to a reply to the parent note, and so on.

The design concept for the site look’s fairly similar to Pownce, but that’s probably because people liked and enjoyed the usable interface. Joel mentioned, “[a] clean, appealing and customizable [theme] like the Pownce layout would be what I think it should be.”

And though Six Apart is shutting Pownce down, it might be worth Joel’s while to investigate whether or not he could be legally liable for creating such a similar looking website. The reason I bring this up is that one commenter on Joel’s updates mentioned that Creative squeezed $100 million out of Apple back in 2006 based on non-patented creative elements of the iPod’s UI.

By way of Joel’s updates, it sounds like things are moving along fairly well after only five days of work, but with the clock ticking fast towards Pownce’s demise, users had better get their data exported soon if they’d like to take it with them to Topixz.

Also, with only 100ish members registered on Topixz of the roughly 160,000 Pownce members, an effort definitely needs to be made towards spreading the word about Joel’s attempt at salvaging this community.

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.

I came across this gem late last week - a series of scripts, conversions and LEGO tools that allows you to send a message to Pownce and the robot to pour a beer for you. Some people may question the usefulness of such a contraption, but the beauty of being a geek is that you don’t really need a reason.

This is just an example of a setup that could be used for a more repeatable purpose. The main drawback of the robot is that it has to have someone reload and open the beer each time it dispenses one, unless some kind of beer-quiver addon is going to be developed. If another purpose were contrived - say, locking and unlocking a door - the utility of the robot would be greater due to no need for human intervention. Who needs keys when you could just Pownce your door to open?

Got other ideas for a contraption like this? We’d love to hear them.

With Twitter being the first major microblogging platform, they were also the first one to implement the “everyone stream”, a warp-speed listing of the most recent messages on the system, constantly being updated. As other platforms have popped up, they’ve each addressed the everyone stream in a different way.

Today we’ll take a look at several popular microblogging platforms (Twitter, Pownce, Plurk) and how they handle the everyone stream.

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Pownce continues to make updating your location even easier. We previously covered their integration with Fire Eagle, but now they have added Geode support to the mix. (And additional credit is due to Pownce’s Leah Culver (!leahculver) for her participation in the development and launch of Geode prototype)

So what is Geode? Geode is an experimental add-on to Firefox 3. This add-on is planned to be part of future Firefox releases, however, it has been made available now as an add-on to allow websites to start adding location awareness to their list of features.

With Geode, any Pownce users who visit the site with the add-on installed can now update their location using an update button under the Fire Eagle location. By clicking on the button the users are then asked to grant Pownce access to the location. Once granted the user’s new location should appear in the profile and each note sent on forward.

Pownce is working very hard to add location awareness to their site and with integration with Fire Eagle and Geode they continue to stay ahead of the pack. For more information including setup see Pownce’s blog post here.

Pownce has always had a special place in my heart as it was my gateway into microblogging and ultimately sent me over to Twitter. Lately Twitter has had a number of problems with its stability and all too frequent appearances of the failwhale, but until very recently Pownce hasn’t been the gem of performance either.

Truthfully, its load times and overall non-responsiveness was one of the reasons I moved over to Twitter. I know, weird. However, this is quickly changing as the Pownce crew continues to be hard at work and improving performance without having to kill off features.

One such improvement to the platform includes a note dated two days ago from Michael Malone. In it Michael declared a minor victory in microblog scaling for the Pownce crew. I am not sure of the details of the change, but in the note Matt announces Pownce has upgraded its infrastructure with the help of Ron Gorodetzky from Digg and made a number of code tweaks.

It’s refreshing to see Pownce zipping along again and responding to clicks and refreshes. The improvements have been noticeable for the community and the crew is receiving great feedback. The Pownce team deserves it too because no one wants to spend time sitting and waiting for their screen to load.

Allowing replies to microposts is finally seeming to become more commonplace, but there’s still a long way to go.

Pownce seemed to be on top of things when it included replies in a user’s message stream as part of their key feature set. Since then replies have been present from the beginning in platforms such as Plurk and Rejaw.

However, with each of these platforms, replies are simply just that. They don’t truly facilitate an ongoing conversation. The trouble is that unless you started the micropost, you simply aren’t notified of later replies (except on Kwippy, where you can subscribe to replies by email -Mike). And due to the nature of microblogging, the thread you’ve participated in can easily be buried amongst the stream of ongoing noise.

Pownce service Bownce looks to remedy this situation. In their web application, Pownce users can now conveniently view all of their replies and all of the replies posted after it. At version 0.5, the site doesn’t offer many features, but it starts to fill in the gaping hole of missing replies and aids in facilitating conversations.

If you are on Pownce and would like to start tracking what replies have been posted after you, check out Bownce.

If you have other methods for tracking replies on Pownce or any other microblogging service, please leave us a comment below so we can give it a try.