Dec 19 2008
Pownce has closed down
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/omegatron/398330773/
It seems that I am at least 4 days late to bring you this unfortunate news - Pownce has officially closed down on December 15, 2008.
Pownce was a free social networking and micro-blogging service founded by Internet entrepreneurs Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka and Shawn Allen. Most people in the Web industry would know Kevin Rose as the main guy who made Digg possible, his stakes of 30-40% in the most popular social bookmarking site has been estimated to be worth more than $60 million dollars.
Pownce was initially an invitation only service launched on June 27, 2007 and it was said that the invitations to Pownce were so high in demand that they are being sold on eBay. Pownce is later opened to the public on January 22, 2008. This means that it operated less than a year before closing, since it was open to the public. Although its lifespan was rather short, it has achieved great success and may even be relaunched by the company that has since acquired Pownce, Six Apart.
Let’s see how Pownce measures up with the (arguably) most popular micro-blogging service Twitter.
Twitter.com - PageRank 8 and Alexa rank 624
Pownce.com - PageRank 7 and Alexa rank about 150,000.
I expect the number of users who were on both services and the volume of user-submitted content are essential to compare those services but unfortunately I do not have access to such information. If any of you could point me in the right direction, I shall update the comparison as soon as possible.
So where do we go from here on?
If you were an exclusive Pownce user in the past, I suggest you to take a look at Twitter. It has been around for much longer and I do not believe that it would be closed as well anytime soon. Otherwise if you are interested to learn about other smaller and less popular micro-blogging services, perhaps I should come up with a simple list of them soon, so make sure you check out this site frequently.
I am not writing Pownce off yet, as I have said, it may eventually be relaunched by the people at Six Apart, be it under the same name or another equally cheeky one. Six Apart seems to have many pretty interesting projects at this moment and with the team from Pownce joining them, it is definitely one of the blogosphere company we need to keep an eye on. By the way, surely it has not escaped your attention that the domain name Pownce.com is worth some money with its good rankings, backlinks and traffic? Estibot estimates the value to be about $4,500 but I personally think it may be worth at least about $20,000~$50,000.
Have fun micro-blogging and feel free to forward this piece of news to your friends who have not heard about it.
Do you micro-blog? What service(s) are you using? What are the features you love or wish to have on micro-blogging services?
