Adios Pownce
Six Apart has acquired the twitter wanna-be Pownce today. As of December 15th, Pownce will shut down, and all of its handful of users will have to go back to using other services……even perhaps twitter which they probably used in the first place. Leah Culver (very cute) and Mike Malone from the Pownce staff will join Six Apart. Users can import their posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, and WordPress.
Pownce launched back in 2007 and was actually formed by Leah Culver and Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg. Seems odd that Kevin has like 75,000 followers on his twitter page, but didn’t focus any effort in mentioning to them about his other endeavor. If you go back to its initial alpha launch, you could find people actually auctioning off test invites!
Rumor has it that Pownce, which was self funded, was unsuccessful at securing a round of venture capital.
From the company blog it doesn’t seem like that Six Apart will make any attempt to Pownce’s revival. Kind of pointless to try to take on twitter anyways. Culver says it plays to “come back with something much better in 2009.” Curious to see what that will be. What Six Apart does get is some amazing programming talent out of Culver and Malone. Also, included in the deal, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will join Six Apart in an advisory role.
