Too Geek To Be True

Yesterday, I was informed by one of my Twitter’s friend that Pownce is closing down.  I went straight to logon to my Pownce account which I, admittedly, haven’t visited for more than 6 months, and there it was, on the top of my profile page was a banner informing that Pownce will be no more after the 15th of December, and if I would like to know more, it advised me to read on the linked Blog Post.

At that point, I actually felt both sad and a little bit guilty.  Sad because despite of Pownce superiority compared to other Micro-Blogging services (including Twitter), at the end it has to face the music and give in to the harsh reality.  I felt a bit guilty because even though I know and recognize the above fact, I actually left it and went to other service (Plurk at that time).

For those who don’t know about Pownce, it is a Micro-Blogging platform, much the same as Twitter and Plurk, but better.  It was the brain-child of a couple of brilliant peoples, including Kevin Rose of Digg, Leah Culver the programmer extraordinaire and Daniel Burka on the design side.

The release of Pownce last year, on the trail of Twitter and Jaiku (also another Micro-Blogging platform which was acquired by Google), was greeted by both cheers and scepticisms.  Many internet pundits praised it because it had all the features that Twitter’s users had always wanted but could never get (Twitter at that time still couldn’t cope with its ubiquitous fail-whale, let alone thinking about new features).  Others were sceptically asking question whether the internet crowds needed yet another Micro-Blogging App.  Nevertheless, I am sure as a testament of Pownce team expertise and determination, Pownce was launched successfully and even managed to gather many hardcore fans.

So what went wrong?

First let see what I meant when I said that Pownce is superior compared to other similar services.  Pownce has all features that other services could only ever dream of, from DAY ONE!  These features include the followings:

Pownce has 4 types of post:

1. Notes – normal message post
2. Link – to post a URL
3. File – special for sending file with automatic media embedding (photo,video and music)
4. Event – special for sending event invitation (location, date, time)

• Pownce message does NOT have 140 chars limitation.
• Pownce message can be sent to the following:

1. Privately to one friend.
2. To a Set of Friends (Same as Plurk’s Clique).
3. To All your Friends.
4. To Everybody regardless (Public Timeline).
5. Pownce message is Threaded (like Plurk, still missing from Twitter).

• You can have Friends and Fans.
• On a Friend request, you can accept, leave as fan, or block.
• You can ‘group’ your friends as sets (like Clique in Plurk)
• You can see who are your friends, your fans, and whom you are fans of (this one is something that Plurk could only manage to do recently).

• Pownce Web interface is beautifully designed, thanks to Daniel.
• Pownce introduced Themes since the day one.
• Pownce has Windows and Mac Desktop App (via Adobe Air) since the word ‘go’ (something that others are not able to do, without third-party’s help).

• Pownce employs ads !
• Pownce offers Pro account ! (I’m one of them)
• Pownce had API very early on, which helps developers to build services on top of Pownce.

On this particular point (i.e. API), I owed Pownce a gratitude, because this was the time when I did my first API Programming, which led on the nascent of Powncetastic.com, a Web App to Aggregate Pownce messages by types, and to show some statistics.  Unfortunately I abandoned the project for other newly launched service, which was Plurk.  For anybody who is curious, Pownce was built using a Python Framework called DJango.

As you can see, Pownce has all the standard functionalities that you would expect from this kind of service, and much more.  Theoretically, this app should triumph above all, and live a long life.  But in reality it just weren’t able to get that critical mass to sustain its life, not with Twitter keeps going strong (and stable) by the days, and other new services nipping on its heels.

For example, Plurk is very successful not just in the US and Europe but more importantly in East Asia as shown in this Plurkerati Stats; Identi.ca hold its own market in Open-Source Micro-Blogging, Brightkite with its Geotagged presence, not to mention all other Social Networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are introducing Micro-Blogging service as a new feature.

Another possibility could be that, as I have been noticing for quite some time now, people tend to stay where they can meet or to have conversation with their friends, or to go where their friends go.  I personally have been witnessing more and more of my Indonesian friends, who used to be hardcore members of Friendster Social Networking Site, migrate (or maybe flock) to Facebook en-mass.

So, since people don’t have their friends with whom they can have conversation with at Pownce, they would not stay there for long.  Finally, with how the current world’s financial situation is going down, it is no surprise to me that Pownce decided to cut minimize their ‘liabilities’ and called it a day, before it’s too late.

I believe that Micro-Blogging space will always remain a niche market and one of the most technically challenging at that (remember the Fail-Whale?).  It is going to be hard to survive the competitions let alone to be successful.  The demise of Pownce can be seen as the sign of the beginning of the market’s saturation, where only the strongest (technically and financially) and the most innovative ones (unique features or even more niche market) will live on.  There are other services out there that are still trying to claim a piece of this virtual-land; Jaiku, Plurk, Brightkite, Identi.ca, Rejaw, Youare, Yammer among many others.

Who will be next?

On this note, I wish all good luck for the Pownce Team, I heard that some of them are going to work with SixApart.  Thanks for inspiring me to take on my personal challenge.  I guess I’ll see you around.