What were the factors that caused the demise of Pownce.com
First Pownce announces at their blog about database issues, causing the site to start ” acting a little wonky”. I don’t think anyone saw the wording however leading to being something more serious, perhaps the closure of Pownce.com?!?!
Pownce itself was an originating member of the “online status updating tools”, the “what are you doing right now” updater as it were. However, both Leah Culver and Mike Malone founders of Pownce definitely established a new way to look at status updating, emphasizing largely on how users would share files via the service. Some seemed to have a very skeptical view, some even harshly negative of the Pownce team
Commenters in the Techcrunch.com writeup of the service didn’t take a shine to it either, the view was that what could this achieve that an email couldn’t. I do believe that Pownce did grow into something of usable form, although I did think that the audience of Twitter.com outshone Pownce, simply the early adopters such as Robert Scoble scathed Pownce when it first came out and drew everyone into how amazing Twitter was, until he found Friendfeed!
But one unanimous point that I think everyone agrees on is that Twitter uses an API, this special code set has enabled many different ways to track your Twitter, whether it’s desktop clients such as Twhirl or Twitterific, or online tools such as Friendfeed or Yahoo Pipes. But where was Pownce’s API, apparently according to Dave Winer of Scripting.com it was “kicking Twitter Ass” (an interesting note is how Dave actually linked to a Flickr picture of his example at Pownce.com in case you couldn’t see it, a sign of what was to come?)
But even with his valid argument, Pownce still couldn’t win them over, many went onto flock to Friendfeed which collects all the services such as Twitter and Pownce into one stream of data, and the rest is history.
So what of the founders of Pownce, Leah Culver and Mike Malone, well they have run on off to SixApart.com, which is a synonymous blogging tool for many professional writers on the Web. I wish them the best of success in their new venture, however I would be interested to see the numbers on either Twitter’s or Friendfeed’s site as more people flock to signup for a new service. My suspicions is that they are already on Friendfeed, but Twitter may offer them a different alternative!
Signup for Twitter at:
Signup for Friendfeed at:
https://friendfeed.com/account/create
Blog Reaction to the news of Pownce.com going down!
This story was originally published at: Josh Chandler's Blog
