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.

• In July of 2007, we pownced on Pownce.
• In March of 2008, we began to Plurk.
• In July, we turned to Identi.ca.
• Last month, we looked at newcomer Rejaw.
• This week, the chatter is about Fidj.it.

I even wrote a very positive review of Rejaw, and I still think it’s the best of the bunch in terms of functionality. The chart below shows the spikes in traffic that each of these sites have enjoyed:

The Pownce bounce was the highest for a long time (in July 2007, it was about 250,000), but Plurk passed it a year later with their debut, which was well-timed in the midst of severe Twitter outages.

All of this is impressive, however, only until you add the king of the area, Twitter, to the chart:

Suddenly, things don’t look so impressive for the Twitter competitors. It’s clear in talking to people (and reading mainstream publications), that Twitter has crossed over into the mainstream.  That’s going to be tough for the other folks to beat.

When we look at the competitor’s daily velocity on Compete (meaning a snapshot of whether they are growing by day or shrinking by day), we don’t see much good news here either. Over the last 45 days, Pownce had some growth toward the end of August, and Plurk’s had some very minor spikes, but since September 1, Plurk, Identi.ca and Pownce are all in negative territory.  I see others talking about fatigue from trying all these sites and I’ve personally used them all a lot less in the last few weeks as client needs continue to grow.

At the end of the day, though, technology is one thing, while community is another.  Anyone building one of these apps needs as much emphasis on attracting users as building the site, because we’re well best build it and it will come.

What do you think? What’s your favorite micro-blogging site? Are you starting to see some fatigue in keeping up with all these locations? Let me know what you’re seeing.

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What happened? Well, you can see the headlines over on TechMeme. Twitter blamed its “popular” users for its woes. Now, who could that be? Right. Venture Beat filled in the blank, if you just weren’t sure.

A business that blames its best users is one that’s in trouble. Serious trouble.

It’s so sad to watch a business make so many bad decisions like this one is doing. Right now a pretty significant part of Twitter is down. Track isn’t on. IM isn’t on. Other parts of the service are giving me tons of whale photos that say something is technically wrong. It’s so sad because I really want to use this service to keep in touch with my friends and fans and family and enemies and all that. They all were on Twitter. Now? On FriendFeed alone I now have 11,566 followers (a large percentage of which joined in past two weeks). There is a migration underway, although most people say “I really want to be on Twitter” even after trying out competitive services like Pownce, FriendFeed, and Jaiku.

Please Twitter: fix your darn problems and stop blaming your users. You now have $15,000,000 in venture. You have no excuses anymore.

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I joined Pownce (my profile) back when it launched, but haven’t touched it since, mostly because it wasn’t as well used as Twitter–understandable considering you had to have an invite in order to use it.

So, will you switch to Pownce, stick with Twitter, or use both/neither?

Here’s a peek at it:

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Microblogging: What Is It Good For?

If you know and/or follow Lynnette Young, a.k.a. LynetteRadio on Twitter, you would be interested in knowing that she’s on the brink of labor, very near to producing a Halloween baby. You’d also be aware that her husband is in New York sans cell phone.

What use is that to the business-minded? At this point, not much. Later, though, as media converges – especially social media – one might imagine contextual advertising for diapers and baby wipes appearing next to the appropriate tweets. (The 140 character or less posts are called "tweets" on Twitter.)

Perhaps that’s what Google plans to do with recently acquired Jaiku, a platform similar to Twitter. Perhaps that’s where all this is headed as the bubble gets bigger: large companies swallow up social media, interlink them, and monetize them under one umbrella, carefully targeted by demographic.

Until then, we’re left with fragmentation teetering on frustration. With so much social media out there, how does one have time to utilize it properly? Well, just like you pick your battles, you’re going to have to pick your social network.

Twitter, for example, is stuffed with early adopters, thought leaders, and technophiles. If this your target market, then it’s a good idea to be there Twittering too. Verizon’s John Czwartacki takes his company’s message to the lion’s den. In a crowd most likely to be pro-Net Neutrality, Czwartacki hasn’t missed the opportunity to present the positive aspects of his company to industry critics/bloggers.

So, microblogging is a useful public relations vehicle, or a place to be careful with your words as one PR pro found out recently. You connect with influencers, and have the opportunity to connect with the network of people they follow, but you also can keep tabs on projects – people love to talk about their projects.

Dave Winer, the self-titled original blogger and inventor of RSS recently Twittered (or tweeted?) about his New York Times "River" project, which allows readers to order their news to suit their preferences, rather than, as is tradition, allowing the editors to prioritize news.

It’s a two-way street. Winer keeps his "followers" abreast about what might be the next great platform, and if his followers ever get tired of him, they can simply un-follow him. That makes it an excellent vehicle for permission-based marketing – choosing not to follow someone is a built-in user-controlled spam filter.

Bloggers use microblogging as a supplement to their main blog by posting a short description of their latest blog post and a link. How long do you think it will be until the search engines begin crawling for that type of information?

But the real future blockbusters, I think, will be the microblogging platforms that are more tightly targeted and present more intuitively useful variations on the originals. It’s not hard to see how PlaceShout, for example, has an intrinsic value. It works like Twitter, but its goal is consumer reviews. Users have 100 characters to jazz or razz a place of business, and the reviews are overlaid on Google Maps.

The weakness right now, though, is fragmentation and saturation. Though options are good, too many choices produce social-media overload. You would have to hire at least one full time person to maintain your presences on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, the blogosphere, the forums, the search results – the list just keeps getting bigger.

One day, I can imagine Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offering full search/social/traditional media advertising packages that pull all of these things under one roof – a managed campaign offering. And they’ll probably be expensive. Until then, choose your media carefully, and use it to its full potential.

"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?

Plaxo Launches Social Network Pulse

Using "people feeds" users can subscribe to the people in your address book and receive the content they want to share with you from a number of sites. The list of sites that are compatible with Pulse include, Amazon, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo 360, Yelp and YouTube.

The company says they have plans to add more sites that are compatible with Pulse.

"Pulse represents the natural evolution of Plaxo," said Todd Masonis, Founder and VP of Products. "It’s all about keeping you more richly connected to the people you actually know, by transforming your address book into a true social network for your real personal and professional relationships."

Pulse users can share information publicly or only with people within their network. Other features of Pulse include one-to-one connections designed for categorization of relationships into family, friends and business network. It also has a share bar for sending messages, links or videos to those in your network.

Like others, the primary activity is messaging to your social network.  You message to all your friends or public like others, or directly like typing "D Username" in Twitter at the beginning of a message, but also lets you select a subset of friends.  Beyond messages, you can share links, files and events.  Beyond doing this on the web, there is a Windows or Mac rich client.

The digerati and diggerati will probably rant away about how it doesn’t have SMS or IM integration like Twitter, how the content is mundane (same thing with blogging five years ago), how it needs APIs and microformats (which it does, and hooks into Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and Facebook are inevitable), or just complain about adding friends again (Adding friends is the new zen).  The design is slick on both the web and client and they will polish up key details like last names, comment threading like Jaiku, permalinks and need a more public space to explore. 

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it? — Henry Miller

But here’s the three trends:

YASMS Gets and Ad Format — I admire startups that launch with an actual business model.  They have introduced a new Ad Format, a message broadcast into the stream with the Pownce icon (the green P in the above screenshot is an ad from PBwiki, I love wikis) that doesn’t seem to persist.  I didn’t mind the ad from LaughingSquid (first I saw) in my peripheral attention.  And if I did, I could pay to make it go away, but subscribing to the Pro version for $20/year and also be able to send files over 100MB.

AIR Gets a Viral App — The client is built on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly Apollo and still in Beta.  Pownce’s virality will give AIR the airtime it needs for base of users to install it, making it easier for the next AIR client to come along.  This should be AIR’s showcase.  That said, Pownce’s model is what I call contained virality, where limits are part of the draw and when you are in you feel in (at least to share music, a hidden driver).

Consumer Collaboration Get Hip — Anyone who follows the enterprise collaboration space will immediately see parallels with P2P collaboration apps like Groove or Shinkuro.  Or IM, Skype and more directly enterprise IM like MindAlign.  The key difference is group forming by social network and default modes of sharing more publicly.  Pownce will appeal to a very different demographic, that’s already collaborating on blogs, wikis and IM, and potentially full a space in between.

There are several vectors in which Pownce could go, or others could go towards including presence, location, public IM, security, indexing and integration.  Pownce will have to open up invites soon (I’m out, please don’t ask) to build its network effect before others encroach.  It isn’t unique enough to gain the continuous or at least partial attention of users for yet another client.  Infrastructure costs will be greater than P2P.  At the risk of breaking the design and making it too complex, Pownce should give serious thought to the role of standards and how they could be a client for Facebook.

Please, I don’t have any invites.

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