The End of a Micro Blogging Service

Of all the offerings, one of the first micro-blogging services to fall was Pownce (www.pownce.com). Pownce was started by Kevin Rose, the co-owner and founder of Digg.com. It started in January of 2008 and was shut down in December of 2008, just days after being taken over by Six Apart, the previous owner of the famous blogging site Live Journal. Pownce had a superior set of features as compared to some of the others.

The service could be availed via an invitation-based system. It was so famous that invites were even sold on online auctioning sites such as eBay. Some of the features that Pownce had were the ability to send messages, files, links and even set events. Files of up to 10 MB could be attached. The pro version of the service allowed even larger files. Groups out of friends could be made and sending messages to these groups was possible.

This was something not seen on most services and still isn’t very common. Pownce was talked about because of Digg’s huge community. It had support for mobile phones and there were clients based on Adobe’s AIR developed for it. The developers said that they would come back with something much better in 2009.