They had a better interface than Twitter. They had star power & geek cred via Kevin Rose. They had an actual revenue model. They got tons of press. They had more features.
Why couldn't they get users?
Of course Pownce is shutting down: it's been months now since anyone needed a place to complain about Twitter outages.
My own analysis, now five months old, is a lot wordier:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211870
Twitter holds a huge marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original.
a) They didn't do anything new
b) They didn't let people do anything better, faster, or cheaper than they do now
Their tag-line is "send stuff to your friends". I already use a service that does this–it's called "email".
Twitter just had too much momentum. Pownce got press, but nothing that came close to competing with Twitter. Whether good or bad, people cannot and could not stop talking about Twitter.
Tried something awesome against entrenched competitors. Made progress, and accomplished a lot. It didnt work out, but they got some sort of payout and immediate jobs! For the founders this is a lukewarm win, but still a win, I would think.
If that's so, what does == Failed?
I can see how this move might make sense for Pownce's people, but the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service?
the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service
They were not forced, they entered into an agreement because it was favorable to them.
---------
be unsuccessful
disappoint
fall short in what is expected
Failure (or flop) in general refers to the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective
There are degrees of failure and success.
You can change the goal post-outcome, but it doesn't change what really happened.
Yes, maybe they got a small chunk for the IP, and maybe they will start something else down the road ... but Pownce failed and they have to work for someone else now.
Users don't care about star power. When I think of Kevin Rose--or rather, when I think of Kevin Rose and am not overcome by waves of nausea--terms like "star power" and "geek cred" do not appear in my mind. Aside from Digg users, he has very little impact, and even among them, it's not much.
Users don't care about your revenue model. The few that do are the ones that don't approve of it and will ditch you for it.
Users don't care how much press you get. If it's a social site, your users are your press.
Users don't care about having more features. The few that do are a waste of your time.
also, the api took forever.
How do you get users to use Facebook, and Pownce, if they already use Facebook and there's no longer a compelling reason to use Pownce?
Plus, they were competing with a bunch of other companies trying to beat Twitter.
How many Twitter clones do we need, really?
(Note the irony in this post: a me-too post about a me-too company)
The mp3 sharing feature? It hasn't compelled me to try pownce, there are already music-sharing social networks (pandora and LastFM) and I can paste a TinyURL'd link to youtube containing music or video into Twitter just fine.
As such they had no defensible technological advantage ("have a feature before someone else" isn't). They didn't have a strong technical person, all they had were decent web developers (Facebook's Dustin Moskowitz seems to be fairly talented and I know they had a very strong operations team; Google had backing of academia behind).
They could have still been a niche site and profitable, but they instead chose to burn their money on PR (this is clearly evident) hoping to "get big fast".
In fact, this is the same reason I persist in not using Twitter. Just because my friends tend to start and end with Facebook.
1. Trying to do too many things. Too many features meands market confusion and cluttered interfaces. There is power in simplicity and purpose.
2. Twitter had already won. The early movers and adopters were already there and the network effect was in motion.
3. Using Adobe Air for their non-web interface. Twitter never worked for me until Twitterific, but air is just SLOW and annoying I personally couldn't abide.
And because people thought of it as a Twitter competitor (yes, I realize I just did this above), where it was more of a Tumblr competitor with a worse interface, ads, and paid subscriptions.
Power law observed in most naturally occurring scale-free networks means there will be a few sites that have most users ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
But if you're asking why Pownce never approached Twitter in popularity, I think that the case is the purest expression of network effects that you can find. That's not the whole story, of course, but it's most of it.
If you are going to do the whole twitter thing, you'll go guess where? thats right twitter. Everyone who is anyone(if you want to call that) was using twitter, so people just signed up for that.
And they couldn't pull a facebook/google...because twitter was doing a good enough job for most people.
But Twitter didn't suck enough for Pownce to be able to get that core segment of new users who are annoyed and frustrated with the competitor.
Interestingly however DropBox has seemingly been a success which I believe offers a more targeted solution to the problem (file transfer), rather than trying to be all things to all people. If there is a lesson to be learned here I would have thought it was that. Like 37signals often says, try to do one thing really well. Don't try to offer too many features etc. and dilute your product into yet another (I got that feature too). That seems to be the mistake of Pownce.