The Pownce team announced the imminent closure of the service via their blog this week: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.”

The Pownce founders and technology are moving across to Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Vox, Movable Type and TypePad. Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be joining the engineering team at Six Apart, hoping to continue their vision there.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products.

For current users, the team has set up an export function so that Pownce posts can be shifted across to other blogging platforms such as Vox or WordPress.

The adoption of the Pownce team is yet another move is what appears to be a bigger play by Six Apart. Six Apart has also welcomed Kevin Rose (co-founder of Digg, Revision3 and Pownce) and Daniel Burka (who has a history with Digg, Silverorange and Pownce) as advisers.

Six Apart has been a significant player in the social blogging movement since the early days. The transition of the Pownce team and technology across to Six Apart should bode well for further exciting innovations in the blogging and social media space.

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 Leah Culver

There’s no shortage of options, anyway, and Pownce isn’t making the adjustment hard.  "Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function," cofounder Leah Culver explained on the Pownce Blog.  "You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."  Pownce Pro users can even get a partial refund or free one-year subscription to TypePad Plus.

As for the details of the acquisition, financial terms haven’t been disclosed, but both Culver and Mike Malone, another cofounder, will be joining Six Apart.  Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will act as advisors.

It also appears that an important new social blogging product or service of some sort is already in the works.  Culver wrote, "We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009."

If Compete’s data concerning Pownce’s unique visitor count is at all accurate, at least 180,000 people will probably be quite interested.

"Since I originally came up with the Pownce gender list, I’m somewhat miffed that Digg copied Pownce," reads the post at Digg. It showed Culver as the poster, and linked to an image in her Flickr profile.

The image has been deleted since the original post, which leads us to think Culver experienced a little remorse about submitting it to Digg in the first place. Digg’s Kevin Rose also runs Pownce where he presumably worked with Culver at some point during its development.

Culver’s stated problem about the gender list refers to a simple dropdown list of added choices one can make for a profile, on either Pownce or Digg. Pownce is closed to outsiders who want to sign up, unless they have an invitation to join.

Fortunately, Beth Granter grabbed a screenshot of the Pownce gender list in July, shown here:

Digg’s gender list in its recently updated Profiles section contains similar entries, viewable under one’s About Me link in Settings. Many of the entries match Pownce’s but Digg left out ‘Chicky-poo’ in favor of ‘grrrl’.

It’s a strange thing to get upset about, especially when Culver likely can contact Rose easily and talk about it. A simple dropdown list like this one doesn’t contain any trademarks or copyrighted terms that should send anyone screaming for the lawyers or anything like that.

Sure is a funny old Internet sometimes, isn’t it?