Pownce goes kaput, world’s smallest violin plays in the distance
It’s been making its way around the web today that Pownce is going to shut its doors on December 15th. While it didn’t come entirely as a surprise to me that they are shutting down (especially with competition from Facebook and FriendFeed), it was a surprise how quickly they plan to shutter their services. I even got this kind email from Pownce informing me of their impending permanently-offline-for-maintenance mode:
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.
Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownceOur thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,
The Pownce Crew
My first question is: why do people keep comparing Pownce to Twitter? In fact, I’ve seen a few blog comments and tech news commentary sites compare the two. If anything, Plurk is a clone of Twitter. Pownce was more like FriendFeed: the soul purpose, it would seem to me, was to share links, documents, blog posts, etc. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform; Pownce was supposed to be a content sharing and discovery platform. How are the two at all alike?
My second question: why such a short notice for the shutdown? Two weeks? What if people were on vacation this month? I would imagine this was a sign that Pownce had run out of money, and no one had interest to take them over as a web property and continue the services.
In any case: best of luck to the Pownce crew at Six Apart.
Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing
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