I have heard about the recent buyout of Pownce by Six Apart (the company that owns LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType). Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes the buyout between Internet properties makes for an improved service and allows the developers to build their service and it’s features to make the service that much better and to entice more people to use the service. Hell, thanks to Yahoo!’s vast resources and data centre space, Flickr was able to provide it’s pro users with unlimited file storage and an immense photostream. However, the buyout of Pownce by Six Apart kind of seems odd because the people at Six Apart don’t have any desire to continue improving Pownce. In fact, from the press releases I have seen from Six Apart and Pownce (which were linked to above), it seems that Six Apart is shutting down Pownce in a couple of weeks. Yeah, you heard me right, Six Apart bought Pownce and they decided to close down Pownce two weeks after they announced the acquisition. I don’t know about you, but doesn’t this seem like the most retarded business decision ever?
I haven’t seen as to where this is going to lead, but one can only ask what the hell is going on when a company decides to purchase an Internet service, promote the acquisition as a good thing and then announce that they are going to dump the service. What’s worse is the fact that Pownce users who paid a certain amount of money to go Pro won’t be able to get their money back. Instead, what they will get is a free 1-year membership to TypePad. Oh, just lovely, instead of getting your money back or having Six Apart keep the service, you get stuck with either a 1-year membership to a crappy blogging service or nothing at all. This is just wonderful, Six Apart. I can imagine the same thing happening to LiveJournal except for the fact that the already emo people on LiveJournal will become more emo and move on to a copy-cat service like DeadJournal (where the emo people are even more emo). Having said that, Six Apart, you have seriously fucked up, or in the words of L Ron Hubbard, you really goofed the floof.
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6 Comments
Hi Jessica, sorry to intrude, but I work with Six Apart and saw your post and just wanted to clear up a few things.
First, we don’t own LiveJournal any more. While we’re still good friends with that team, they’ve independent for a year now.
Second, I’d invite you to re-read the posts you linked to where we wrote about the Pownce acquisition. I think the first words from our CEO Chris Alden are very clear: “I am pleased to announce that today we are welcoming the Pownce team and technology to Six Apart.”
And I know you’re just speaking off the cuff, but I gotta say — TypePad’s not crappy! I’m very proud of the work our team does there, and it might even be worth checking out yourself. For instance, TypePad powers a bunch of services you could use even on this site powered by WordPress, like TypePad Connect for better comments, TypePad AntiSpam, which fights comment spam like Akismet but is free and open-source unlike Akismet, and even other tools like Blog Link which lets you connect your blog to a LinkedIn account, or Blog It, which lets you post to your blog from an iPhone or from within Facebook.
Basically, I’m pretty proud of what my friends/coworkers do at our company, so I wanted to make sure you know we’re not crazy and we don’t waste money — in time I think people will see the results of the work we’re putting in, and how it can help all bloggers.
Really? So, LiveJournal was flipped like they do in real estate? And here I was thinking that the formation of LiveJournal into it’s own company meant that it operated as a subcompany within Six Apart.
Yeah, I know that you want to use the technology of Pownce and are proud that you are getting to use the technology in Pownce. But one can only ask, why destroy the original service? I don’t know how you are going to leverage the technology in Pownce but I do know that it would have been a better idea to link it to all the other Six Apart products and achieve two ends, to make the existing Pownce service stronger and to integrate the technology into Six Apart’s products. You could play this in so many ways that don’t involve shutting down Pownce.
TypePad is not crappy? Well, let me put my two cents in: In my opinion, hosted and closed-source blogging systems are crappy. My WordPress, I can modify the code to my liking, I can add and remove features at will and I can change the style by changing very important template files. I haven’t seen too many TypePad blogs that have the level of customization that self-hosted blogging solutions have. Do I think that WordPress.com is crappy? Nah. Do I think that Blogger is crappy? Not really, but it could improve. So, why do I believe that TypePad is crappy? Simple, you are paying for a hosted blog service without the customization that you can get when you pay for hosting and install the software yourself.
I think that it was a pretty foolish decision to kill Pownce. But then, I’m not a multimillionaire with money to throw around.
It appears that Pownce Pro users who do not want a TypePad account can get a pro-rated refund: “If you have a Pro subscription to Pownce and do not want a TypePad account, you may be eligible for a pro rated refund. Enter your details to receive a refund.”
Oh? I didn’t see that.
But one has to wonder, why would Six Apart spend so much money in buying Pownce and then refund everyone who bought a pro account and didn’t want a TypePad account? Much puzzlement abound…
@Anil:
“First, we don’t own LiveJournal any more. While we’re still good friends with that team, they’ve [sic] independent for a year now.”
Oh really? If by “independent” you mean that you sold LJ to a ridiculous crazy Russian company who’s currently doing worse to LJ than even YOU guys could manage (quite a feat in and of itself!) than sure, they’re independent. I’m also the Queen of France. Then again, I’m not really surprised to hear that you’re “good friends” with the same team of people tripling up the ads on LJ (that we were, I remind you, promised we would never receive in the first place) that are filled with malware and spyware with no way to opt-out of such damaging ads…
Also, it’s quite interesting how quickly you pounced (I bravely resisted the pun there) on this blog entry as a SixApart representative, but when people at LiveJournal (yes, while you still owned it) wanted an explanation for you banning recently purchased permanent accounts ($150!) just because of some fanart, you were nowhere to be found. Tell me, Anil, since you’re so “proud” of the work you and your coworkers do at SixApart, why is that?
Also, out of curiosity, is this an official comment sanctioned by SixApart or are you speaking “off the cuff”, as it were?
@Jessica,
I’m sorry most of this comment wasn’t about your blog post, but the BS meter on that “unofficial” comment was so high I could resist.
I definitely see your confusion here, but one thing you can be certain of is that nothing SixApart does will ever make sense, but it WILL eventually and with very great results succeed in pissing off its customer base.
I don’t even understand why it is that people even use Six Apart’s software. MovableType is about as good as Blogger because it has to rebuild the files every time a template change is made, comments are posted and all sorts of stuff. TypePad is not nearly as good as WordPress and isn’t as extensible.