“Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart”

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

I don’t understand what’s going on with the Silicon Valley these days. It used to be that you bought a social site for the community, and tolerated the start-up’s founders for a while before driving them to quit; now they only buy the brains behind the product, and can’t wait to get rid of the users — that makes no sense to me.

I can only hope that Six Apart’s offer was so low that Pownce’s investors had to say “okay, we won’t get any offer better than that, but for the price we’d rather nuke the user base and just let you absorb the engineers.” (Note that I haven’t seen anyone bragging about the price yet.)

But it doesn’t make that much sense, either, as I don’t see what need Six Apart would have for Pownce’s engineers. No offense meant, but it doesn’t strike me that they designed revolutionary technology, or that they had to find ways to deal with tremendous scaling issues, or that Six Apart was in dire need of engineering talent.

We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.

You don’t seriously expect that, after you’ve cut your users’ platform from under their feet (with two weeks of notice) and sent them back to Twitter (who would be well-inspired to whip up an import script for Pownce’s backups in the next 48 hours… even though they don’t really need that), they’re going to come back on Vox when you release a new service?