The first major micro-blogging casualty has emerged over the past week. Pownce, a Twitter-like lifestreaming service, announced it was closing its doors (figuratively speaking) mid-December.
The Pownce team announced the imminent closure of the service via their blog this week: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.”
The Pownce founders and technology are moving across to Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Vox, Movable Type and TypePad. Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be joining the engineering team at Six Apart, hoping to continue their vision there.
We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products.
For current users, the team has set up an export function so that Pownce posts can be shifted across to other blogging platforms such as Vox or WordPress.
The adoption of the Pownce team is yet another move is what appears to be a bigger play by Six Apart. Six Apart has also welcomed Kevin Rose (co-founder of Digg, Revision3 and Pownce) and Daniel Burka (who has a history with Digg, Silverorange and Pownce) as advisers.
Six Apart has been a significant player in the social blogging movement since the early days. The transition of the Pownce team and technology across to Six Apart should bode well for further exciting innovations in the blogging and social media space.
