Goodbye Pownce

The news came today that Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart, and will shut it's doors on December 15th 2008.

Coming on the day that the USA confirms its in a recession can't be great news, but I don't think this move is solely economy driven, though Six Apart recently laid off some folks.

Pownce came on the scene and offered more than Twitter, by letting its users share links, files, and calendar events.  Though for me it never really had a sense of community that I could tap into, like Twitter. At least they are letting people know early and are offering a way to export your posts.

I'm glad to see some of the team go over to Six Apart and it reads as though they are taking the technology with them, but I wonder is this the next step for some of the other messaging services?

Twitter still has not defined a real way to make money (Pownce offered inline ads) and the name-of-the-game is increasingly aggregation for a way to navigate the current social web.  Will Twitter buy, or be bought by, some blogging software or possibly one of the search engines?

As is so often the case I think the thing on most peoples lips is "pity. what's next?"

Technorati tags: pownce, six apart, closing, social, web

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Nice touches at Huffduffer...

Catching up on my early morning tweets I saw one from Jeremy Keith about the launch of a new site, Huffduffer.

Its an interesting premise. Build your own RSS feed of sounds that you've find whilst traversing the Internet. You can then podcast your finds and subscribe to others.

Not so much as of a social network, more a network of social sounds. I could see @disquiet and @warrenellis making interesting use of this.

One nice touch of the design was the sign-up form.

I like the way its laid out, working like I'm filling it in on paper rather than just a series of HTML form fields. The choice of fonts for the filled in information is nice too.

One other thing I noticed. From the minimal information I gave at sign-up, virtually all of my other Internet places showed up in my profile. There is at least one that is not mine, but someone I worked with who took over my work blog, which could explain it.

Jeremy has said that By its nature, this will never be a popular, mass-market site. But, as is the case with most things built to scratch a particular itch, which is sometimes the best thing.

For the coders out there it shows what you can do with some PHP, HTML5 and microformats.