Six Apart Buys Pownce, Shuts it Down

by Jarrett Martineau | December 1, 2008 at 01:19 pm

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Pownce gets pwned.

The former micro-blogging rival to Twitter is being purchased — and shut down — by Six Apart.

In light of Pownce's shutdown, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for other competing microblogging services such as Jaiku and Identi.ca.

Did you use Pownce? What do you think about the closure of the service?

Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks.

The San Francisco startup was the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka (also a Digg employee). It’s a micro-blogging service kind of like Twitter, but it allowed users to share much more than brief messages, including embeddable photos, videos and mp3s. Despite those advantages, Pownce’s traffic stalled while Twitter’s skyrocketed, according to data from Compete.

Pownce is probably the second-best-known micro-blogging service around, and its disappearance should solidify Twitter’s supremacy.