Pownce PWND: Acquired by Six Apart, Then Shut Down

Pownce, once thought to be Digg's Kevin Rose's answer to Twitter, has been acquired by Six Apart, the makers of TypePad and Movable type. Does this merger of two obsoletes have Web 3.0 potential?

As Wikipedia describes it, the term PWNED is a "...slang term, derived from the word 'own', that implies domination or humiliation of a rival." Users of Pownce, a micro-blogging and social networking site, received e-mails yesterday informing them, "Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today [December 1, 2008], Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts." Pownce members were encouraged to check out Vox, a free social network and blogging service. Pownce was one of the latest experiments in micro-blogging and social media. Much like the increasingly-popular Twitter, and it's competitor, Plurk, it could be updated from a cell phone, and "posts," were expected to be short. Users could also form networks and share files and photos, features that have not been fully developed on Twitter. Perhaps one fatal flaw in the development of Pownce was its creators' reluctance to mash with other social networking sites, seeking instead to develop a destination spot rather than a tool for social networking. The tendency to control content, tone, membership and usage of a social network to please the network's investors has also been the Achilles heel for Kevin Rose's other project, Digg, which started out as the ultimate "tech," social network, but is slowly making its way down the path of Fark in relevance. Will combining a largely unsuccessful social networking experiment with a paid blogging platform that has been decreasing in popularity at a rate inversely proportional to the success of the open-sourced Wordpress. help Six Apart move ahead in a virtual world that is transitioning from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0? Time will tell.