When Pownce first came out, I was very interested. The fact that you could use it as a transport layer for files (video or whatever) was interesting. But the UI was unnerving.
Today VentureBeat announced that Six Apart bought Pownce and is going to kill it off. One would assume the Pownce brains are going to work on something at Six Apart that involves microsharing in one capacity or another.
Pownce is probably the second-best-known micro-blogging service around, and its disappearance should solidify Twitter’s supremacy. Of course, Twitter’s challenge has less to do with trouncing the competition and more with making money and attracting users outside the tech crowd — now that it finally appears to have solved its reliability problems.
The tech behind Pownce was rather keen. It simply lacked the fervor of Twitter and the UI elegance of Plurk.
The thing that gets me is, no one seemed to have even noticed. The VentureBeat article didn’t even make it into Techmeme.
Hi, I'm one of the product managers here at Six Apart. I saw your recent comment on ariwriter.com regarding TypePad Connect. I'd love to hear your top issues and feature requests, so please feel free to email me at [email protected].
To address your concerns, we know that community features such as following and tracking are extremely important for the TypePad community. We are working on making these available next year.
TypePad Connect was released as an off-blog commenting platform only because it’s still in Beta and we’re working out the kinks. Once we move out of Beta, all the features of TypePad Connect will be integrated into TypePad. You will not need to go to a separate platform for comment management. If you want to give it a try now, the integration will be seamless and we provide flows between TPC and Typepad so it shouldn't feel like you're completely on a third party platform.
Posted by: kimmi8 | 01 December 2008 at 16:55
It has always been my theory that the reason Twitter took off at SXSW in 2007 was that it worked with phone text messages. You could use it to hook up with people in the real world, to find who was at what bar or which party was lame or which panel was totally great or whatever.
I realize that SMS only limps along on Twitter now, and that most of the current users don't use it the way it was used back then. But that first critical mass of users was driven by its mobility and real world broadcasting capabilities - something Pownce never had, and thus didn't inspire any early adopters to jump ship. Which, of course, left Twitter as the best (if still far from perfect) thing going.
Posted by: Laura | 01 December 2008 at 17:15