For people out there who has never heard about Pownce before, it is a micro-blogging platform (just like Twitter) with file/event sharing and subscription model (free and pro subscription). It was launch around June 2007 (closed beta) by Kevin Rose (Digg and Revision3 founder) and Leah Culver (self-proclaimed python goddess LOL). I started using the service around August and abandoned it within a month.
It started out to compete directly with Twitter, but failed to do so and just bought over by Six Apart (a company that played around with OpenSource) for unknown sum (I have checked for every sources on Twitter and blogs and still no clue on it).
Pownce has not done very bad job, they started the rise of Adobe AIR’s application by developing desktop version of Pownce using AIR. Apart from that, everything else has failed - in terms of userbase (not much people know what the hell is Pownce although they do know Twitter) and service performance (Twitter suffers several performance issues cos their userbase is HUGE but Pownce suffers as well although they have very limited userbase and their storage is outsourced to Amazon’s S3).
For me, although there were and still are many micro-blogging services out there, I still prefer Twitter.
Update: I have some contact with Sean from Reinvigorate recently, and it seems like they will be rolling out new services and features for Reinvigorate in 1 or 2 months time, after lying low for almost 8 months. So I will just cross my fingers and wait for a surprise. Just glad to hear the service is not dead yet.
Some of you may have heard of this service called Reinvigorate which is a hosted real-time website metrics services like statscounter, Mint and Google Analytics (well this one is not so real-time). I started using this in 2006 for several websites and blog, and still using it until today. The project itself is somewhat dead, last updates or message I received from them was in middle of 2007 when Reinvigorate was still in beta. Since then, the service is still functioning except the fact that nobody is accepted for the service anymore.
For those who have managed to get an account, it is indeed a blessing as it is a good one (much better than WordPress.Com stats). User Interface is excellent, there’s a desktop client for users to check the site events realtime and various kind of graphs and stats. The only bad thing is that existing users are not able to invite other people to join instead they can only add the sites into their account and create additional access information for other users.
For those who have never seen how Reinvigorate looks like, I have a screenshot below showing the dashboard.
