Use your Vox, don't Pownce

I woke up this morning to news that Pownce, a microblogging service created by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose (the Digg guy), Ariel Waldman, Daniel Burka and Mike Malone is shutting down in about 2 weeks. It turns out Six Apart, creators of TypePad, MovableType and Vox have acquired Pownce, largely for its team:

I am pleased to announce that today we are welcoming the Pownce team and technology to Six Apart. Pownce launched in June of 2007 and opened to the public earlier this year, but, as mentioned on the Pownce blog, Pownce.com will be closing in the next few weeks. We have a lot of respect for what this team has done and believe we share a common vision about making the Internet more social.

We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board.

It appears that the team has been taken on to help develop Vox further and I am curious to see which direction Vox goes with the addition of this talent. I thought I’d take a look at how Vox compares to services like Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku and Pownce and the result is pretty interesting. According to Alexa, this is what the last 6 months look like:

With the exception of Twitter, the blogging services are far more popular than the microblogging/status services. I wasn’t expecting Vox to be quite so popular and seeing that its reach is pretty close to Twitter’s, it is a service worth paying more attention to! Certainly at least as much attention as I paid to Pownce …

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blogging, microblogging, pownce, vox, six apart, shutting down