Megatechtronium is pulling the plug on its microblogging social-network site that allowed users to send music, photos and messages to friends using the Pownce Web site or desktop software.
Megatechtronium, a San Francisco-based company created by Digg founder Kevin Rose along with Leah Culver and Daniel Burka in June 2007, says Pownce will disappear on Dec. 15, less than a year after its service was made available to the public.
Culver, along with developer Mike Malone, will join the engineering team at Six Apart, a San Francisco-based provider of blogging software and the company behind Vox, Movable Type, TypePad and Blogs.com.
“We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service, but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009,” Culver wrote on the company’s blog. “We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.”
Moving On
“We are really pleased to have Leah [Culver] and Mike Malone joining Six Apart, as they are super-talented and we know will contribute great things,” said Jane Anderson, Six Apart’s spokesperson. “It’s too early to talk about what they’ll be doing, but they have already begun work here in San Francisco.”
Anderson said Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will join the company as advisers.
On Six Apart’s blog, Chief Executive Chris Alden said he has a lot of respect for what the Pownce team has accomplished, adding that the two companies share a common vision on making the Internet more social. “The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging, and we’re really proud to have them onboard,” Alden wrote.
Six Apart had a good year, hiring 90 people and growing the company to more than 200 employees. But the company took a hit from the economy and had to let go eight percent of its workforce in November. The company also took some…