Pownce, a social media service that has failed to gain traction, is to close down this month after its team and technology were acquired by the blogging company Six Apart.
Pownce caused an initial flurry of excitement among Web 2.0 aficionados when it launched in June 2007. It was given a certain cachet by Kevin Rose, who co-founded it and had already co-founded the popular Digg news site.
As recently as August, Leah Culver, another co-founder, was featured on the cover of MIT’s Technology Review, which said Pownce was one of 10 web start-ups to watch.
Six Apart said it would be merging the Pownce team with its Vox blogging service. The main Pownce website will close down on December 15.
The service allowed private messaging among friends and file-sharing. It was compared to the micro-blogging service Twitter, but was harder to grasp than Twitter’s simpler 140-characters-or-less messaging concept.
Om Malik, the well-known tech blogger, told The New York Times in July last year: “I love [Pownce] and use it constantly, I like it because it lets me share a lot of different things with the networks of people I really care about.”
Yesterday, he blogged on GigaOm: “I used the service for a few months but then lost interest, and so did many of my friends.”
It seems Pownce was just one service among many micro-blogging ones and lacked distinct features that could have helped it become mainstream, or even hold the attention of dedicated social networkers.
Commenters on another service, Friendfeed, pointed out on Monday that Kevin Rose himself had spent more of his time on Twitter than his Pownce creation.
“That’s like the CEO of Pepsi being seen drinking Coke, if you can’t stand behind your product, how do you expect us to?” said one.
