Monday at 2:19 pm
- Link
Igor Poltavskiy, G. Saunders, Aaron Draczynski and 24 other people liked this
oh boy, here comes the finger pointing...that sure didn't take long - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)
wow that was fast.. u gotta admit giving the community they built 2 weeks and its gone is a bit harsh. - Jay Martinez
whole-heartedly agree with that post. Kevin let pownce die, he really only used it to share stuff, but stuck with twitter for the bulk of everything else. - Jay Martinez
Nope it was @kevinscold fault hehe :) - Eldon
via fftogo
I wasn't under the impression that Pownce was trying to be Twitter. Kevin shared a lot of files. It was a site intended for people who had large groups of online friends who shared files. I suspect that that audience was a bit of a niche, and that explains Pownce's failure to overcome Twitter. Status messages are more universally useful, and Twitter beat them to it. - Jesse Hattabaugh
I noticed this a few weeks ago how FriendFeed made it pretty easy to see how Rose was using Twitter (and Digg) so much more than Pownce. He didn't appear to have much use for his own service. - Robert Haas
Okay, so now the comments about him using Twitter for that cold nonsense make more sense. - Anika Malone
Allen, you are on fire today. Good stuff. - Phil Glockner
I definitely agree with this. I thought the same thing when I read the news of Pownce's demise, but I think another issue was that Pownce never gave me a reason to use it, if that makes any sense. I have a tumblr and I have twitter. Why do I need Pownce? I think there was also a problem with community building in Pownce, it was difficult to just find friends or new people. At least, for me it was. - Mattie Kenny
it's true though. Kevin pimps Digg gear at every turn, why not Pownce if he was truly invested in the idea? He shouldn't have touched Twitter, seeing it as a competitor. That's like the CEO of Pepsi being seen drinking Coke, if you can't stand behind your product, how do you expect us to? - Matt Musgrave
Thanks everyone for the feedback - Allen Stern
I think Kevin's opportunity to get people to move to Pownce was during the large number of Twitter outages earlier this year. He could have called his Nation to arms and many would have probably moved. Seems like Twitter has become much more reliable and the window may be closed for any real competition at this point. When a product reaches verb status (I Googled this, I Twittered that) it seems like the game is over and the winner has been declared. - Michael Pardee
bummer, I really liked Pownce. - Thomas Hawk
very good point Michael - Allen Stern
I have to say that I didn't really use it much. Why? No real reason. I don't use Tumblr much either, or Posterous. Nothing against them, but there's only so many hours in the day, and I spend most of the time I have for SM in Friendfeed or Twitter (with a few minutes most days in FB). After that, there's blogs to attend to, RSS feeds to read, photos to upload, music to share and listen to, and then it's time for bed. Oh, there's a day's work in there somewhere as well... - Ian May
Kevin stayed off Twitter as long as he could. The amount of media attention Pownce got from the mainstream tech writers and bloggers dwarfs Kevin's network of followers. If Kevin + this media attention couldn't supplant Twitter, nothing could. Kevin is smart. Once he saw it was a loosing battle, he made his presence on Twitter felt in a massive way. You can't fault him for that. - Josh Kenzer
Look at these visitor graphs - http://siteanalytics.compete.c... Pownce had an uphill struggle regardless of anything that Kevin Rose did, or did not do. There is also something about Twitter that instills a strong sense of loyalty to the service. I don't claim to understand it, but it was greatly in evidence when Twitter was Fail Whaling regularly. People kept coming back despite trying other services such as Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk. - G. Saunders
Maybe he simply realized (and accepted) that pownce was not going to be successful while the rest of the team did not? No point in beating a dead horse. The others might have seen it differently and wanted to plow on. I would say that most of the early hype was due to his celebrity status which gave them a head start. - Alexander Kohlhofer
Alexander - I agree on the celeb status - just look at all the blogs drooling over him on the closure! It seems somehow the service made Leah into an overnight sensation too. - Allen Stern
