You may have heard the news (since both Twitter and Pownce is flooded with links to Leah Culver’s blog post) that Pownce is shutting down on December 15th and that a few of the team members; namely Leah Culver and Mike Malone – are joining Six Apart.
One could sit back and try to analyze why this is happening; with Twitter as Pownce’s main "competitor" (whether justly so or not) and with Pownce having a reasonable amount of uptime problems – you could say this is a result of these two, or many other things. But I’m less worried about the "why" and more interested in the "what’s next"?
That is why I asked Mike Malone, one of the Pownce team members that is moving to Six Apart, to answer two simple questions (which he was happy to do).
Leah said, in the blog post announcement, that "we’ll come back with something much better in 2009" – Does this mean that Pownce will come back as a better service? Or, something completely different?
"It is going to come back as something "very cool and very different". […] Whether it will be called "Pownce" is to be determined."
Pownce seems fairly active still. Is there any direct benefit to shutting the service down within two weeks?
"The benefit is basically that we can concentrate on the new projects we’re working on."
After asking Mike to elaborate on the second answer, he stated that it is generally tough to keep Pownce up and running and takes up a lot of time. Shutting the service helps them to free up their time in order to focus their efforts on getting, what they feel, is a really valuable new service up and running quicker than they could have without shutting Pownce down.
Pownce, although I really liked the service, never really made it into my daily stops insomuch as other services like Twitter, Brightkite, and FriendFeed have. So I can’t say I’m particularly saddened about its being shut down. However, I do look forward to Six Apart and the ex-Pownce team creating something new and exciting in the New Year that hopefully will be a more focused and stable product to use.
Thanks to Mike for answering my questions.