Another one bites the dust? Pownce, a would-be Twitter rival that was heavily hyped due to the involvement of Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, is closing its doors in two weeks.
It's not quite going away, according to a post from Pownce founder Leah Culver on the start-up's official blog. The technology has been sold to blog platform Six Apart, which runs TypePad and Movable Type. And its two full-time employees, Culver and Mike Malone, will be joining Six Apart's team.
"We'll be closing down the main Pownce Web site two weeks from today, December 15," Culver wrote. "Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function...(you can) import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."
Pownce, which is like Twitter with additional features like file-sharing, was so buzzworthy at its debut that people were auctioning alpha test invites off on eBay. It also had a business model, with paid accounts available for sale. But the Pownce hype died off, and Twitter gained more and more market share.
Additionally, we heard that the self-funded Pownce was trying to secure a round of venture capital. It looks like that didn't work out. This is, after all, not a great time to be raising money.
Six Apart is encouraging Pownce members to join its blog platform Vox. "We hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future," Six Apart's Chris Alden wrote on the company blog.
Pownce's two other co-founders, Rose and Daniel Burka, will become Six Apart "advisers."
Another one bites the dust: Uber.com, a fledgling blog platform that was backed by Discovery Communications and Universal Music Group, shut its doors Friday. The reason? The investors pulled out.
"We have some bad news," a message on the Los Angeles-based company's home page read. "The crisis in the economy has claimed Uber as its latest victim. Our investors have decided to stop supporting Uber and we have closed the doors."
Uber had been co-founded by former Friendster CEO and NBC Entertainment president Scott Sassa, and had completed a $7.6 million series B venture round this spring that included money from the aforementioned investors as well as venture firm Sterling Stamos.
With a focus on editorial content centered on highbrow art and media, including a Huffington Post-like "Uber Index," and the slogan "it's easy to create better," it was tough to define Uber. Was it a blog platform? A social network? A discussion hub? The financial crisis didn't help, but the truth is that Uber had never really taken off in the first place.
Women's blog network Sugar Inc. has made a surprise move: it's giving users access to its platform so that they can create their own blogs. The San Francisco-based company made the announcement through a post on its tech blog, Geeksugar.
The new system, called OnSugar, promises a "sweet and simple" alternative to services like Google's Blogger and Six Apart's TypePad. Powered by the Drupal open-source platform, it will give bloggers free access to Sugar's tools for creating multiple kinds of posts: regular text posts as well as photo galleries, polls, quotations, videos, and the like (yes, this is a bit like Tumblr).
OnSugar bloggers can also take advantage of shopping widgets from the Sugar-owned ShopStyle, take a cut of the sales, and use images from Getty Images for free. They can also have Sugar import existing blogs on Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad into the OnSugar platform.
This is surprising, given the fact that the industry trend has been to create an ad network to pull in publishers, not a blogging platform. Sugar, which already has loads of user accounts through its social network, TeamSugar, will not be serving any ads yet but rather will let bloggers use the ad network of their choice. That includes the ad network of Glam Media, which is typically talked about as a Sugar competitor.
No price has been named, but Google has made a new purchase: the Korea-based blog platform TNC, co-founder Chang Kim wrote on his blog Thursday.
TNC, founded in 2004 by Kim and Chester Roh, has created a blog software product called Textcube. An earlier TNC platform, Tistory, was sold to Korean portal Daum.
Google already owns a blogging platform, Blogger, which it purchased in 2003. From a technological standpoint, it's not immediately clear why the company would want another one--although Kim likened his company to Blogger rival WordPress (and its parent company Automattic), the favorite of the open-source community, which could give a hint one way or the other. But more concretely, Kim wrote that this acquisition is in part to help Google get a bigger foothold in Korea.
"One piece of fact that my American friends have (a) really hard time perceiving is that Google is an underdog in this part of the globe," he said. "Korea is the world's sixth largest market in terms of Internet users, and yet Google has a market share that can only be described as 'minor' in Korea."
In spite of how wired Korea is, Kim added that there is indeed a place for Google. "I think the Korean web industry needs a player that can, as a balancing force, provide more options to the users and help create a more open web," he wrote.
I'm always eager to get my hands on new publishing tools. We've got our own in-house blogging tool at CNET, but on the side I like to stay well versed in various other platforms both big and small. A new one from Profy.com (whose blog is actually a competitor of ours) launched on Wednesday and has been garnering some buzz from some of the other blogs. I thought I'd give it spin and see if the hype is well deserved.
What I can say after spending some time testing out its features is that it's off to a good start, but far from a Wordpress killer for people who are seriously thinking about launching any sort of commercial blog. It's more in line with Blogger and Ning's offerings in setting up a vast network of interconnected social sites that your users can navigate to and fro while retaining the feeling of being on the same service.
Besides having a fairly standard WYSIWYG blogging interface, and integrated RSS feed reader, the real draw to the app is its interconnected social network. You can add other Profy users and blog owners as friends and contacts. The service goes as far as integrating instant messaging and presence management to let you know when someone's online. Once you've added people as friends, you can then keep track of their new blog posts, along with what they're reading if they've opted to share what RSS feeds they're subscribed to. The RSS reader itself isn't too shoddy either. While not as feature rich as the big guys, I actually prefer its layout to Google Reader's (at least on our RSS feed) because it displays who the author is on the title of each post.
Everything seems designed with a simple user in mind. There's no access to your blog's CSS, instead everything is simplified down to a fairly sizable collection of templates that can be custom-tailored (very much like Ning) with the user picking where they want each site element to go. The same goes for the domain, which lives under the Profy.com moniker and can't be linked up to one you already own. All these things make it very simple to get started and make changes on the go, but power users will likely want a little more.
The site is currently in private alpha with no timeline on when it'll be open to the general public. For now, they're offering Webware readers 100 invites to get their own blogs going. To get yours, go to this page and enter "Webware" in the description box.
Screens below. There are two more after the break.
The WYSIWYG blogging interface should be familiar to Blogger and Wordpress users. Bundled in with the rest of it is the RSS reader, contact manager, and admin tools.
(Credit: CNET Networks)... Read more
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