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Great News! Twitter Clones Begin Closing Down…Starting with Pownce.

Written on 1st December 2008 35 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

The chances are you’ve heard about Pownce shutting up shop and frankly I am delighted! I’m delighted not because I enjoy witnessing companies fail but because it’s about time Pownce members tried bigger and better services. Services who really listen to their users and create tools which actually enhance the web experience for them.

I’ve been a member of Pownce since day one and at one point, a devoted member and daily visitor. However, as time went on, reccurring bugs weren’t fixed, feedback wasn’t acted on, other services launched, original members abandoned ship and eventually, so did I. I did return every now and again to see if things had improved but more often than not I was met with a blank white page which seemed to be a never ending problem (if you’re a Pownce member, you should know what I mean).

The team behind the service is joining SixApart and Pownce is closing in 2 weeks, and in my opinion – good riddance to bad rubbish. Hopefully two weeks will be enough for any remaining ever-faithful Pownce members to find better services and no, I don’t mean Twitter.

Good luck to Leah Culver, Mike Malone and everyone else involved.

35 Comments »

About the author: Based in London, Zee is Editor in Chief at The Next Web and Principal at online marketing and new media agency WeDoCreative . A prominent tech blogger, he is also a design & marketing connoisseur, social media devotee & web application fanatic.

35 comments/trackbacks to “Great News! Twitter Clones Begin Closing Down…Starting with Pownce.”

Dec 3, 2008: Pownce stellt mit 15.12. den Betrieb ein auf datenschmutz.net
[...] multimedial auszuweiten, bietet Pownce keinen echten Mehrwert, und so hält sich die Trauer der Netzgemeinde in engen Grenzen: I’ve been a member of Pownce since day one and at one point, a [...]
Dec 3, 2008: datadirt.net
Pownce shuts down – And the moral of the story?…

Pownce recently announced that the microblogging service will shut its virtual doors on December 15th. Twitter has one another duel – the whole Pownce team will be working for French-US blogging company Six Apart.
……
Dec 15, 2008: Finnish geeks say goodbye to their beloved Jaiku « TheNextWeb.com
[...] like Pownce, Jaiku had some issues which nobody resolves. Before you know it, my co-editor Zee is dancing on your grave because you didn’t listen to your [...]
Dec 16, 2008: Finnish Jaiku Community Fights Back. Hard! | ArcticStartup
[...] choice of words. They even came after me on ArcticStartup’s journalistic standards. I got the same treatment as TheNextWeb contributing editor Zee M Kane, even if for different reasons. After the points have [...]

By David Petherick on Dec 1, 2008

I hear Pro Account holders will get something in the way of a Six Apart account.

I must admit I’d rarely used Pownce other than for cross-posting from Twitter or Ping.fm – but at lest I get to export my data.

I think Six Apart may have made a very smart move, or perhaps a doomed one, as IM-style micro-updates across blogs could be an area for huge growth, or a money sink for proprietary technology that will be swept away by an open source, data-portable and platform-neutral toolset.

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By Ville Vesterinen on Dec 1, 2008

Zee,

By “..find better services and no, I don’t mean Twitter.” you do mean Jaiku, right? =)

If any one of you ex-Powncers want to get a Jaiku invite and join the community I’ll be happy to send an invite to your direction. Just email me at ville[at]arcticstartup.com and write ‘Jaiku invite’ to the Subject field and I’ll send one your way right away.

Jaiku rocks!

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By Outsanity on December 2nd, 2008:
Jaiku sucks because they are still in Beta and it takes forever to get an invite code

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

Noone should ever be happy about entrepreneurs failing. Shame on you for writing that. I always have respect for those who take risks, rarely for people like you who get satisfied from other people’s failures.

I do not know what you started yourself and what risks you took, but I will always wish you that you never read what you just wrote about one of your businesses.

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
Loic, i’m not sure if you read my post thoroughly but I did clearly state my reasons for why I was pleased to see twitter clones shutting up shop.

If you seriously think that I enjoy witnessing entrepreneurs fail then you are seriously mistaken. What I do like to see is proof that listening to your customers and improving your service will keep you around much longer than a business which doesn’t – and Pownce was definitely a business which didn’t listen to it’s users enough in terms of improving reliability and adding quality highly-requested features.

So if by Pownce shutting down we get a dozen more AWESOME businesses that learn from Pownce’s mistakes …then yes, i am genuinely happy that Pownce is shutting down.

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By Texrat on December 15th, 2008:
Rationalize your article all you like, it’s still done in poor taste.

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

thanks for the clarification, but I disagree. I understand your criticism they were not listening enough to their users, but listening to your users does not mean you can find a business model and succeed, unlike you say, and for many reasons. The #1 being that very few of these users are ready to pay regardless of how demanding they are. It is sad, but it is a fact. Blame them for not listening fair enough if you think it is true, I respect that, but you should not get happy because they fail. We do not have to agree on this, that is just how I am.

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
Fair enough Loic, and thanks a million for coming back. I do appreciate that you can’t listen to every single request thrown into the hat but when I was a member of Pownce…believe me, I waited for months for some of the bugs (not features) to be fixed and they simply weren’t. I honestly would have stuck around if they had been…That more than anything is what ticked me off and yes probably lead to this post title and my “delight” because I want more companies out there to listen to their users – not necessarily from a features standpoint but at the very least from a feedback & “bug fix” point of view.

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By Allison Reynolds on Dec 2, 2008

Loic I disagree. No one should ever be happy with putting up with crappy service or social applications that do not listen or improve for their people.

Accepting the status quo and being sentimental about something that is not delivering helps no one.

This is a whole new world, and if you are not listening to your people then you are first up against the wall when the revolution comes… and the revolution is already here on the internet.

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By Mediamum on Dec 2, 2008

Totally agree with Loic. Your post reeks of the sort of dancing on the grave done by those without the guts to get out there and make a go of things themselves. You want the service to be perfect, but don’t want to appreciate the enormous work, commitment and incredible risk taken by those willing to stick their necks out. A far more responsible, credible post would have applauded the effort.

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
Mediamum, the only thing I can agree with is that yes I am dancing on a grave. Hopefully I am dancing on the graves of businesses that haven’t listened efficiently enough to their users and in doing so highlighting what it did wrong and ensuring many other business survive, grow & prosper.

I don’t want a perfect service by any means – i don’t think one exists. I want a service which listens to their users, fixes problems and does it’s best to improve the service…I didn’t see that with Pownce.

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

Allison, you can’t believe how much I agree with you about listening to your users, just ask the Seesmic community… So I fully agree with that point, if they were not listening, not good. But being happy about them failing? Mmm not to that point for me sorry.

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

I remember having heard Leah on a panel with me saying how much proud she was on the community and the fact that a few users had begun paying. The only feelings I can have for her as an entrepreneur today is being sorry for her.

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

btw in case anybody doubts I think listening to the users is not important you can check here :)

http://getsatisfaction.com/seesmic

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
clearly you know that is not the case… The number of times I’ve heard people who have problems with various web apps and within minutes you’ll find either the CEO, founder or community manager there asking how they can help get the issue fixed…or at the very least, say that they are listening & looking into it.

You are a good example of this and Edwin from Feedly is another. Unfortunately Pownce i’ve seen complaints about Pownce all over the social web and not once did I see any of the pownce team appear to (at the very least) say they were listening.

This is why I am hoping that by witnessing a service which doesn’t respond to customer feedback efficiently fail… it will ensure hundreds of future businesses do.

Ok, i think i’m all commented out… :) I hope you see where i’m coming from – you’ve brought me a whole bunch of haters on twitter! My first real ‘hate on zee’ experience – i’ll grow from it i’m sure :)

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

Zee, take this as a mark of attention. If I did not care, I would not have jumped on your post the way I did. You react the right way by responding and admitting you went a little bit over the top. Almost :)

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
Lol… :)

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By Outsanity on Dec 2, 2008

I never used Pownce on it’s own. Only via Ping.fm. To get upset that a site is going away is kinda pointless. If you want to send a file to someone, ever heard of Yahoo and any other IM program? I guess I just don’t care that they are closing down.

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By Avatar on Dec 2, 2008

Ouch. and some think i was harsh on pownce. you were 3 times more than i was with it.

The Death of Pownce http://rejaw.com/Avatar/shout/LN0G151nYIS

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Dec 2, 2008

Loic, although I understand your anger or frustration I think it is completely without merit.

In the second sentence Zee writes “I’m delighted not because I enjoy witnessing companies fail but because it’s about time Pownce members tried bigger and better services.”. That one sentence should be enough to make you understand that this review is about the quality of Pownce.

When I first read it I found the post more critical than I was used to from Zee and from other posts on this blog. Then I realized Zee wrote it not as a blogger, and not as a fellow entrepreneur (which he is) but as an experienced and frustrated user of Pownce. And that is exactly what makes blogs so damn interesting. We have REAL stories from REAL people writing about services they ACTUALLY use.

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By Steven Carroll on December 2nd, 2008:
I think this point is really interesting. The fact that the stories here derive from experience, rather than from hired writers who’s job it is to criticize – when for the most part they haven’t a clue what it’s like to be in the ring. I am not a user of Pownce, so I could never comment like this. However as a fellow developer I can understand the anguish of Leah. That said Pownce had a better chance than many to make it work, what with the industry players backing it, such as Kevin and the press Leah garnered was amazing. I think the bigger story here is that despite all the advantages that they had, in this climate it failed.

Interestingly however DropBox has seemingly been a success which I believe offers a more targeted solution to the problem (file transfer), rather than trying to be all things to all people. If there is a lesson to be learned here I would have thought it was that. Like 37signals often says, try to do one thing really well. Don’t try to offer too many features etc. and dilute your product into yet another (I got that feature too). That seems to be the mistake of Pownce.

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By Robert Gaal on Dec 2, 2008

The title of this post is really demeaning. If you’re a real user of Pownce you know two important things: it wasn’t a Twitter clone in the demeaning sense in which you’re using it now, and it was definitely not “bad rubbish”. Judging by your other posts this one could have been a lot more balanced.

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By Zee M Kane on December 2nd, 2008:
Robert, believe it or not I was a ‘real’ user Pownce. I used it since day one and whatever is said…it definitely was a spin off of Twitter. It performs almost exactly the same functions that Twitter performs except rather than use third party tools like we use with Twitter…it tried to integrate them into the service.

I definitely agree the post could have been more ‘balanced’ too but I didn’t feel that was my responsibility as a blogger. I’ve used the service thoroughly, I run my own business, I’ve tried hundreds of web services (including building my own) and the main point of the “good news!” is because I felt it showed the value of listening to your users feedback…And would hopefully ensure other businesses in future would learn from Pownce’s mistakes.

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By Robert Gaal on Dec 2, 2008

Check out this thread for some useful commentary by the way:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382115

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on December 2nd, 2008:
There are a few hilarious comments there. I loved the discussion about what the definition of ‘fail’ is. :-)

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By Patrick de Laive on Dec 2, 2008

The title is indeed a bit misleading.
I feel sorry for Leah Culver and Kevin Rose (both beloved guests at The Next Web Conference 2008). It is never a good thing when a service, where people put a lot of work in (and their harts), quits.
Although it doesn’t have to be that painful for the founders. They can focus on new things, I’m sure Leah will be back with something new and improved.

All the best Leah, Kevin and the rest of the team

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By Wouter on Dec 2, 2008

Entrepreneurs take risks. They might succeed, and they might fail. They are not babies and they shouldn’t be treated like that.

If they succeed, all praise to them, if they build a lousy service, and fail, it serves them right, and make sure you let them know what they did wrong.

Then, and only then they will develop as entrepreneurs, and won’t make the same mistakes all over again. If you’re gonna be all ‘you were such a nice person, I’m so sorry you failed’, it won’t help them shit!

:)

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By Loic on Dec 2, 2008

Wouter, agree on the failure as a way to learn. You can give this feedback to the failed entrepreneurs but no need to celebrate their failure.

Having said that, congrats to Zee for starting an interesting conversation :)

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By Tijs Teulings on Dec 2, 2008

This post was pure troll bait if you ask me. Sure constructive criticism is more useful than sticking to niceties but that doesn’t mean everybody should be just plain rude.

Zee could have made the same points while staying civil which in most cases leads to more productive discussion. That being said he is a brit so he was probably drunk while writing this ;)

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By Ariel Waldman on Dec 9, 2008

Sorry to hear your issues went unanswered. We offer Get Satisfaction topics and a direct email address for users to talk to us about their concerns and for me to log the feedback to distribute throughout the Pownce team. I did a quick look-through of our inbox and Get Satisfaction topics and couldn’t find your reports. Can you point me to where on our Get Satisfaction topics or when you emailed us with your concerns? That way I’ll be able to understand where we have gaps in our process. Thanks and sorry again for the frustration.

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By David on Dec 9, 2008

Don’t agree, Zee,

Pownce offered long messages, images that showed up in posts, comments that showed up in full under the post, and for the aesthetic sensibilities among us, the cleanest looking templates going.

But, it was painfully slow sometimes, and that was it’s death. So, no, I don’t agree, and considering the Pownce team tried to make a good product, why trash them?

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