Twitter rival has tweeted its last
By John Lister
A social networking site hyped as ‘Twitter on steroids’ is to close in two weeks. Pownce’s closure is both a symbol of the importance of becoming the established player online, and of the economy’s effects on Web firms.
Pownce launched in July last year to much mainstream media attention, largely because of the involvement of Kevin Rose, the co-founder of Digg.
While it offered the same ‘nanoblogging’ service as Twitter (short messages of a sentence of two rather than full-length posts), Pownce’s selling points were that it had better organization of posts and replies into conversations, and that it had a built-in file transfer system. There was even a paid account option, with the founders likely hoping the service would become established as the best choice for business users.
Which service was actually better is of course subjective, and certainly most Twitter users seem generally happy with that product. But it’s very clear that offering extra features wasn’t enough for Pownce to overtake Twitter.
There’s already a well-established pattern of one firm becoming established with a particular service (Google for search, Amazon for shopping, eBay for auctions) and rivals struggling to duplicate this success even with ‘better services.’ That may become an even more pronounced trend in social networking where the herd mentality is even stronger: there’s little point signing up to a technically superior service if all your friends and colleagues are on another site.
Pownce had apparently been looking (unsuccessfully) for additional venture capital funding before selling out. We may be hearing a lot of similar stories as investors become a lot more cautious during a recession.
The site will close on Dec. 15 with several of the Pownce founders joining blogging technology firm Six Apart. Users can visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to export their archived posts to services such as WordPress.
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