Pownce never really got it’s feet off of the ground the moment it came online more than a year ago.

I jumped on board to this website when it was still in it’s early beta phase.  I was never really impressed with what it had to offer.  To me, it appeared to be “just another social website” with nothing special to offer.

The reason I think that Pownce never made it off the ground was due to the lack of advertising.  One of it’s founders, Kevin Rose, has a huge Internet presence.  He is one of the founders of the podcasting “network” Revision3, founded Digg.com, and was the host to it’s accompanied podcast, Diggnation. The problem is that Kevin never really pushed Pownce whenever the opportunity came up.  There was on specific instance at a live taping of Diggnation when Kevin asked people who use MySpace, Facebook, and a few other social websites.  He never mentioned Pownce at all.  In fact, one of the audience members yelled Pownce out from the crowd.

Another reason that Pownce never really made it big was because of the members.  Most of the people who joined the website were followers of Kevin, in one way or another.  They were the ones who tried to get others to join.  In fact, when I mentioned Pownce to people they looked at me like I was crazy or something.

The third reason was that Pownce had too many bugs with it.  When the site was in it’s beta form it ran smoothly.  I had very minimal issues with the site that were easily cleared up with a quick hit of the refresh button on the browser.  The day that the site went public, it got bogged down.  There were many instances when the site wouldn’t load at all, or would just sit there when trying to upload a post.  Because of those issues I very rarely go back to the website at all.  I still have issues trying to log in most of the times.

I am still sad that Pownce is going away, but I am still surprised that it lasted this long as it did.  It feels like it’s a failed startup that was just ignored by it’s founders who were hoping that it would die on it’s own.