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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What is it? What is it used for? What is its potential? What are the limits? Who else is using it and why? What can we learn from it? Should I be using it too? Is it okay if I walk away from it? Do I have to use the word "tweet?"

 While you’re at it, ask yourself what is the meaning of a fallen leaf, if there really is one main sound from which all sounds spring, what is the likelihood of becoming one with a stone and understanding its stone-ness, and whether you should wear acid-washed jeans should they ever come back in style.

The frontrunner for answering the Twitter reality question is that all signs seem to point toward "yes."

Is it useful? Yes. Is it a waste of time? Yes. Is it not a waste of time? Yes. Is there not a point to these questions? Yes.

Some are simply walking away from the questions. Andrew Baron put his Twitter account, and his 1,400 followers up for auction on eBay. Why? He wasn’t really using it. As you might imagine, this sparked all kinds of other questions, including whether or not an individual Twitter account, like someone’s stream-of-consciousness, has real monetary value. Current bid is $1,125.

Hugh Macleod didn’t waste much time explaining or pondering the monetary value of his account. To him it was worth the amount of time it took to hit the delete button.

For those not sniffing and walking away, new applications are popping up with more frequency to help make the most of your Twitterized reality. Most recently, there’s Twitlinks.com, a sort of real-time version of Techmeme, selectively pulling from tweets emanating from the Important Bloggers Club.

If, while your BlackBerry is inaccessible, your thumbs are involuntarily tweeting onto the pages of Sky Mall, you can plan ahead to ease your OCD by using TweetLater, which allows you to schedule tweets in advance of your absence.

Which makes it sound really important. Or pathetic, one.

For me, it’s not about collecting followers. You can never be too sure, as with anything on the Internet, what’s real and what’s not. This morning I was tested by Andre Nantel, whose new Twitter account asked "RU4Real?" The experiment yields just how many either blindly follow, or have scripts that make them blindly follow.

Dr. Phil, and behaviorists like him, would say nobody does anything without some kind of payoff. You could use the TweetCloud application to pool a person’s tweets together to get a better idea of what that payoff might be. For Jason Calacanis, his pet topic, understandably so, is Mahalo. So there’s that.

There’s also a closer reason for why I use Twitter: I view it as a kind of impressionist painting. Not that those impressions are always true. You could look at my TwitterCloud and make all kinds of incorrect conclusions, even though some insights into my psyche might be accurate. For me, it’s the real-time, fuzzy glimpse at reality that is important, not necessarily the moral of the tale.

The best stories, by the way, have no point.

But maybe more than one will join in fascination by watching Baron’s artistic Twitter Madness YouTube submission, which broadcasts without any external commentary the randomness of Twitterers. (Externally, I will comment that it is a good reflection of the randomness of creation and thought in general.)

What I like about Twitter is knowing that handlebar moustaches are coming back, that Craig Newmark is hanging out at Carmel winery, that Bluegrass still matters in the Bluegrass, and that Robert Scoble is confused about the time change in Israel—and that Scoble is hanging out there with a bunch of other key influencers.

I guess, but do not know, that at the end of the day Twitter for me is about a weird Twitter nirvana, where I can observe but not be a part of, where truth and untruth sweep across my horizon in a way that I am separate from them, where reality is what it is: something indefinable.