socialmedian: Lessons to Be Learned From Pownce’s Demise

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Lessons to Be Learned From Pownce’s Demise

Source: Mashable!

Dec 02, 2008

Summary

Twitter competitor Pownce is no more. We’ve followed the story yesterday: it was acquired by Six Apart, but not to develop the service further: simply to acquire the talented people that worked on Pownce.

I’d like to quickly revisit the story because I’ve been following Pownce from day one, I’ve actually used it more than Twitter, and I’ve been bullish on the service because I thought it offered a compelling feature set when compared to other services in the space. I was wrong.

First of all, less is sometimes more. We all know that, but it was really obvious in this case: Pownce was the Twitter fan’s dream come true, adding groups, file sharing and several other highly requested features without cluttering the service with too many options. However, sometimes simplicity and lack of options are what differentiates a service and makes it worth your while. Twitter devs may be slow when it comes to adding new features, but they’re slow on purpose, because they understand that Twitter is good, for the most part, as it is.

Secondly, sometimes even being much more re

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Comments (6)

Jschnees,

Dec 02, 2008

i'll miss it. loved the service but i could never get others to join me. i thought it better than email and IM combined.

Sbtodd,

Dec 03, 2008

I liked the service also .. I liked how you could add events.

Jschnees,

Dec 04, 2008

the events section is a nice tool to set up get together's and then share media from them

Shaunabiznet,

Dec 04, 2008

I've heard a lot of comparisons of Twitter and Pownce as Google vs Yahoo. The unique value has to be different in order to sustain. It was an intelligent acquisition; I'm excited to see what's next!

Jschnees,

Dec 04, 2008

well they acquired the company to hire on the people that worked for it. they said they aren't going to develop it further. though i would love to see the service or something similar to continue

Tofu916,

Dec 05, 2008

damn. im gonna miss getting @darkgracie's new files in mi inbox on a weekly basis. i wasnt really moved by the loss of pownce. maybe its just that im SO into twitter, and as sttd previously; i couldnt get anyone else to join mi on pownce.