Pownce

Eighteen months, and invitations sold on eBay

Acquired & killed
19902026

Pownce was Kevin Rose's follow-up to Digg: a microblogging service that also sent files, events and links to your friends. Invitations were so sought after at launch that people sold them on eBay. It lasted eighteen months, and the announcement that it had been acquired was the same announcement that it was closing.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2007
  2. 27 June 2007 Launch
    Pownce launches

    Invitation only. Invitations are resold on eBay.

  3. 30 October 2007 Feature
    A public API

    Followed by a theme editor in November and a mobile version in December.

  4. 2008
  5. 22 January 2008 Launch
    Open to the public

    The invitation queue is dropped.

  6. 1 December 2008 Shutdown announced
    Acquired by Six Apart, and closing

    Both facts arrive in the same announcement.

  7. 15 December 2008 Shutdown
    Pownce closes

    Eighteen months after launch.

The site through time

Browse pownce.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2007 2008 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Pownce 2007–2008 Founded Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka
Six Apart 2008–2008 Acquisition Acquired and closed in the same announcement

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Six Apart acquired Pownce on 1 December 2008 and announced the shutdown in the same message. The service closed two weeks later, on 15 December 2008.

Our analysis: Pownce launched on the strength of Kevin Rose's name rather than a gap in the market. It did more than Twitter, which meant it was harder to explain, and it never converted the launch attention into a reason to keep coming back.

History [edit]

Bought on eBay before it opened

Pownce launched on 27 June 2007, built by Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka. Rose was famous from Digg, Revision3 and TechTV, and the press treated the launch as an event: Wired, BusinessWeek, Webware and the San Francisco Chronicle all covered it.

Access was invitation-only, and the invitations became a small market of their own, changing hands on eBay. For a few weeks in 2007 an invitation to a beta was a status object.

The product was Twitter plus attachments. You could send a message, but also a file, an event invitation or a link, to everyone or to a chosen group. Culver built a public API in October 2007, a theme editor in November, and a mobile version in December.

The problem with doing more

Being able to do more turned out to be a disadvantage. Twitter's constraint was the whole point of it, and it was explainable in one line. Pownce needed a paragraph, and the answer to "why would I use this instead" was never obvious enough.

Growth stalled and there was no revenue.

Two weeks

On 1 December 2008 Pownce announced it had been acquired by Six Apart. The same announcement said the service was shutting down. It closed on 15 December, two weeks later, eighteen months after launch.

Leah Culver later open-sourced parts of the work. Kevin Rose went back to Digg, which has an entry of its own here.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Open Diary Invented the comment, in 1998 1998–2014 Typepad Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years 2003–2025 Posterous Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off 2008–2013

Sources [edit]

  1. Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce VentureBeat 1 December 2008 [archived]
  2. Microblogging in 2007 TechCrunch 9 October 2007 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).