Pownce Is Still Alive
Yeah, I know. It surprised me too, but they are still kicking. Stagnation is the name of the game in Web 2.0, and Pownce is no exception. — In case you forgot, Pownce is a Twitter clone whose added value is the resale of Amazon S3 space.
Context & Ripple Effects
Pownce launched in mid-2007 riding Kevin Rose's profile, and the early coverage was already skeptical: Uncov argued Rose was doing it wrong within days of launch, Scobleizer ran a direct Twitter vs. Pownce comparison, and Jaiku was positioning itself in the same race. By December, the surprise in this post is not what Pownce has done but that it has done anything at all — it is simply still running.
The framing matters: Uncov calls stagnation 'the name of the game in Web 2.0,' and TechCrunch's same-day pickup turned the post into an open question about whether Pownce is headed for the 'DeadPool.' Six months after the initial launch-cycle coverage, the story has shifted from feature rivalry to survival watch.
First-order effects
- Pownce remains operational, so its beta users keep the service — but its stated differentiator over Twitter reduces to reselling Amazon S3 storage space, a margin-thin infrastructure play rather than a product moat.
Second-order effects
- TechCrunch's DeadPool framing puts Pownce's viability into circulation as a mainstream-tech narrative, raising the pressure on Kevin Rose's team to ship visible progress or cede the microblogging field to Twitter and Jaiku by default.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commodity infrastructure like S3 lowers the cost of staying alive indefinitely without growth, producing a class of zombie Web 2.0 clones whose fate is decided by press attention and acquirer interest rather than user momentum.
The trend: Microblogging in 2007 is consolidating around a few winners while well-funded clones survive on cheap storage and founder celebrity, their fate increasingly decided by media narratives like the DeadPool rather than product traction.