Pownce dies. Jaiku sputters. Can there be only one?

With a flashstorm of lighting and a rousing score by Queen, the bloodied head of Pownce.com rolled down the hillside yesterday as Twitter screamed “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!”

Since 2006, a legion of “micro-blogging” sites have launched to compete with Twitter. Despite its chronic server problems and relatively inferior features, Twitter has persevered to become the gold standard of short-form messaging.

Yesterday, Twitter’s dominance was reinforced by the announcement that competing site Pownce will shut down. Its two lead engineers are moving over to Six Apart, parent company of The Social Path’s blog platform, TypePad.

The death of Pownce raises a few key questions. Let’s tackle two of em:

1. How is Twitter outliving services that are actually quite a bit better?
2. What does this mean for the remaining big-name competitor, Google-owned Jaiku?

I'll try to hash it out after the jump.

So why did Pownce die? Was it really worse than Twitter? No, not at all. It seemed to have everything going for it.

The service offered easier navigation, along with convenient tools for sharing photos and videos. The staff included some of the best-known figures in social media, such as Ariel Waldman, Kevin Rose and Leah Culver.

While Twitter had chronic outages and minimal customer service, Pownce was focused on keeping its community happy. Through Waldman, it even helped trailblaze the role of an online community manager, a job title that’s now one of the fastest-growing on the Web.

But here’s the moment of truth. I never signed up for Pownce.

Why not? I’m one of those nerds who tries everything, right? The hard truth is that once you’ve committed to a micro-blogging service, it’s a substantial chore to pack up the covered wagon and head to another.

I knew Pownce was better, just as I now assume that Jaiku is superior in several ways. And yes, there are some people who will try to maintain a presence on as many sites as possible, usually by just auto-posting the same messages all over the Web. I’m not one of those people.

When Twitter survived its severe growing pains and started being up more often than down, it tacitly killed any hope for Pownce. Few normal humans know what “micro-blogging” is, but they increasingly know what Twitter is. The mainstream simply doesn’t want more than one service to use, just as we don’t really want more than one search engine.

So speaking of search engine, what’s in store for Google’s own Twitter competitor, Jaiku?

It’s a slick system with a lot more built-in features than Twitter. Plus, it’s got the backing of the ultimate Internet juggernaut.

But does anyone care?

I’m reminded of a recent episode of This American Life, where Ira Glass interviewed a guy who owns a mousetrap company.

The man said, yes it’s true, people are constantly trying to invent a better mousetrap. But the irony is, it’s quite easy to catch a mouse, even with the cheap old traps you seen in cartoons.

So is Jaiku a better mousetrap? Is Plurk? Is Identi.ca?

Maybe, but it’s too late. We’ve already been lured in and ensnared by Twitter.

Comments

[Andy DeSoto]

Well, first off, I still wouldn't consider Pownce to be a Twitter competitor, even though it was in the mind of most individuals.

I guess this is the problem, then, as how a service is perceived depends on what people THINK it is, rather than what it actually is.

And as nobody was ever 100% sure what Pownce was all about, anyway, even its most dedicated users, this confusion-- and subsequent failure-- was understandable if not predictable.

I'll miss Pownce, at any rate, because it DEFINITELY filled a much different niche in my own life than Twitter.

[Mark Evans]

My sense is Twitter has a stranglehold on the consumer-focused, 140 character-or-less market. But there are other microblogging markets with lots of potential. This includes the enterprise market where customers could demand better security and more features; as well as the 140-character + market for people who to blog but not really. This is where Tumblr is thriving.

Mark

[Keith]

It's really not all that dissimilar to what we've seen happen in the past with AIM, Google, YouTube, etc.

With AIM there were always competitive options. And these days the networks and chat clients are increasingly cross-platform so it really doesn't matter what you're on. But still, a very tiny percentage even use alternative services like Gtalk (or are even aware it exists) because AIM is in the dominant position, at least here in the US.

Likewise with Google they benefited from being so far ahead of the competition during a critical phase in the Internet's growth (when broadband penetration allowed the Internet to become mainstream) that people came to assume that it was the only way to search. Truth be told, Google's standard results aren't notably any different than a service like Yahoo and haven't been for years. But they're so entrenched now they've achieved verb status. Same thing to a lesser degree with YouTube for that matter (at least when it comes to user-gen video; they're still quite vulnerable on the commercial/professional front.)

It's not always who's best, but who's first (at not necessarily first out the gate, but first at achieving critical mass at the right time) when it comest to marketshare.

[Andrea Hill]

Why did twitter survive and ultimately thrive, even as it suffered incredible downtime? Because this social application had one critical benefit: the social aspect of it.

I had a pownce account. I knew three other people who did. All the features about groups and messaging were useless, because there wasn't the critical audience.

"Twitter" is the kleenex of microblogging. The brand name is now the term for the concept itself. This is a great place to be in, because we early adopters are already entrenched, and anyone more slow to come to the table is less likely to seek out a competitive service, because of the success twitter has shown (and as I mentioned before, the critical mass).

I used to want to try Jaiku, but this ridiculously long stage of closed beta has turned me off a bit. It's ok to tease people for awhile, but I'm over it now.

[KatFrench]

I agree with Andrea that Google's endless closed beta has effectively killed Jaiku.

To a certain extent, I think that Pownce also suffered from a closed beta that was too long. They spent the short-attention-span-theatre buzz-budget on the wrong thing.

Pownce should have been focusing on building critical mass in recruiting users, NOT making sure the tech side was perfect.

I wrote an article about Pownce on SEOMoz's YOUmoz blog back in June that I think, still holds water as to why it never took off. You can check it out here, if you like: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/does-pownce-deserve-a-second-look

Oh, and I agree with Mark Evans that Tumblr appears to be doing well, and that it's mostly because it's clear what the differentiation is and what it's for.

[Chris Prakoso]

Wow, you know what interesting about this, I wrote exactly the same topic on my blog: http://plurl.me/2kr.
I agree with you that the main problem was that, if your friends are not there (practically the reason why people gathers on one place) then there is no point that you stay there too, regardless of what this place is like (nice and cozy).
I will give Plurk a better chance, simply because I know a little bit about the statistics, it's different place than Twitter, and it's buzzing with conversations.
Identi.ca with its Laconi.ca back-end (Open Source SocNet) might just survived, though probably not going to be as big as Twitter.
You need to be either strong (financially and technically) or innovative (unique features or even more niche) to survive the micro-blogging scene.