Pownce is a microblogging service that will close on December 15th. This was announced on their blog and those of us who have a user account have received an e-mail with the news.

Pownce was launched as a private beta in June 2007 with an excellent backer, Kevin Rose, creator of the social aggregator Digg and Revision3, who created the company Megatechtronium together with a team of developers.

During the private beta, a great deal of expectation was created as it was seen as a potential Twitter killer. Invitations to try it were even sold on eBay. At the beginning of this year, it was opened to the public.

By that date, Jaiku and Twitter already existed. Pownce came to the microblogging market with the functionality of both, and expanded it. It allowed messages with more than 140 characters to be sent, as well as files with images, videos or songs. It launched with two interfaces, the web-based one and another one based on an Adobe AIR desktop application.

Another important difference from its competitors was that, from the beginning, it had a business model. This had two aspects: contextual advertising and premium accounts, which allowed additional features like sending larger files, access to new themes, no advertising, etc.

The service as such will close, but the technology, the know-how and two of the employees will become a part of the company Six Apart, creators of products such as Movable Type or TypePad. The decision to close the service was made by Six Apart after the purchase. The employees are Kevin Rose and Daniel Burk, both from Digg, who will work as advisers.

Users with free accounts, like me, have the option of exporting all of our data to CMSs like Wordpress, while premium users have three options: a refund, a free Vox account or a year of TypePad Plus service.

Has Pownce been a failure? That the service hasn’t worked as expected, and that it’s being closed because of this is a fact, and therefore it is a failure. But since it was purchased by Six Apart only a year ago, we can see it as a success for the creators.

For me, it has been a failure, since the idea (with some differences from Twitter) has not been able to create a large user community that would challenge the leader. Looking at hit numbers, it is easy to imagine that the model wasn’t as profitable as expected.

In the future, we will either see their technology incorporated into the blog platforms of Six Apart, or the creation of a new product. Twitter, although much plainer and simpler (and also not the first), has managed to capture a large user base that finds new features every day, thanks to its powerful API and the community developing around it.