Pownce we hardly knew ye
Monday, December 01, 2008 by Dave Winer.
I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?) 
There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it's time to pull the plug.
1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords.
2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up.
The biggest problem with Pownce was:
1. It couldn't handle even a modest load. It would get very very slow when anything interesting started happening, therefore keeping anything interesting from happening.
The one thing Pownce got right was:
1. It had payloads!
Three things that slowed adoption of Pownce beyond the inability to handle a load:
1. It was in private beta for a long, long time.
2. It took forever for it to get an API.
3. When the API finally came it wasn't compatible with anything.
Net-net, there were interesting things about Pownce, and we'll remember it with a certain amount of fondness.
Hopefully Leah can take what she's learned and turn out something great at SixApart.
I'd recommend: Twitter-Plus-Plus. (With lots of interop, and do the payloads thing again, they need a kick in the ass over there at Twitter to get it into their product.)
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One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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