Pownce To Close, The Web 2.0 Dominos Begin To Fall

Perhaps heralding the start of the Web 2.0 bubble bust now that the U.S. is officially in recession, Pownce has announced that they're shutting down their service in two weeks:

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We're bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we'll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

We'll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we'd like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we've added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

I still remember the heyday when everyone was talking about Pwnce.

For me, this calls into question our reliability on services "in the cloud." If a service like this can shut down within two weeks, imagine if you had your data on it and didn't log in for two weeks at a time. Everything would be gone.

Sure, you say that you should be backing up all your data anyways, but in reality, most people don't. Think about all the data that you have stored in the cloud. Twitter, Evernote, Google services, Dropbox, and a myriad of other services. Is our data really safe?

Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart [Pownce Blog]