Goodnight Pownce, Sleepwell.

by Calvin Robinson on December 1, 2008.

I think we all saw this one coming. Only the other morning, I was asking myself “Do I really need Pownce?”. It wasn’t out of dislike, I was honestly wondering do I actually use the site.

A handful of my friends are over at Pownce – the kind of people that aren’t much into the web scene, and just signed up so we could transfer files easily. But this didn’t last long, when we discovered it was easier to just use msn (as usual) or the new, sexy, dropbox.

Pownce never really did take off. It didn’t have the grand opening, it practically sneaked out of closed-beta. This of course, was be design. But I don’t believe it worked in their favour.

Saying that, the Hype was all there. After-all, this was a Kevin Rose venture. And then you’ve got all the Leah fanboys to take into consideration. That’s why I think Pownce has a very small, hardcore community. They’re as much Pownce fanboys as they are fans of Kevin/Daniel/Leah. It’s all about sentiment.

I honestly never understood the true purpose of the site. But I don’t think many people did. Maybe it was designed that way, maybe the designers were still struggling to find their ground themselves?
This wasn’t quite a micro-blogging site, nor was it quite a file-sharing site. It tried it’s hand at a few things, but other sites always did them better.

The one thing Pownce did have, was a loyal fanbase. That fanbase are going to take this new very hard. But you know what, they’ll get over it. The Pownce crew are still around, the web2.0 elite are still hard at work – we’ll have many more web apps to appreciate in the near future – let’s not lose perspective.

Pownce may not have been the most original idea, or the most well understood application, but it was nicely implemented, it was developed well, and had a great design. These things will not be forgotten – and I’m sure it made Kevin and Leah a bit of pocket change too No doubt TechCrunch will fill us in on the specifics at a later date.