Pownce, a social media service that has failed to gain traction, is to shut down this month after its team and technology were acquired by the blogging company Six Apart.
Pownce caused an initial flurry of excitement among Web 2.0 aficionados when it launched in June 2007. It was given a certain cachet by Kevin Rose, who co-founded it and had already co-founded the popular Digg news site.
As recently as August, Leah Culver, another co-founder, was featured on the cover of MIT’s Technology Review, which stated Pownce was one of 10 web start-ups to watch.
Six Apart said it would be merging the Pownce team with its Vox blogging service. The main Pownce website will close down on December 15.
The service allowed private messaging among friends and file-sharing. It was compared to the micro-blogging service Twitter, but was harder to grasp than Twitter’s simpler 140-characters-or-less messaging concept.
Om Malik, the well-known tech blogger, told The New York Times in July last year:
Popularity: 1% [?]
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