Rubénerd!

Soup welcome and import page for Pownce users

Sorry for the downright awful heading, it was the best I could come up with having not slept for 48 hours. You know how it is.

I've been telling friends stranded in lifeboats with their exported data after the sinking of Pownce (all three of them!) to grab themselves a Twitter account, add me and join in the never ending fun conversations. Unfortunately as far as I know Twitter doesn't include an option to import previous messages you might have exported from Pownce. If it were me I wouldn't mind, I talk far too much anyway... this is an undisputed fact. Why even these last two sentences have been completely superfluous and unnecessary. Make that the last three sentences.

An alternative is the alternative rich microblogging site Soup.io which has created an import feature specifically for former Powncers. From their Updates account:

Last week, Pownce surprisingly gave their users two weeks notice – they're shutting down the service on December 15 after having being acquired by SixApart.
We've built this migration tool to offer abandoned Powncers a new home. We even added another post type to be able to properly import everything.

Their easy to remember http://www.soup.io/pownce page has the importer. As far as I can tell, you don't even need to be logged in or have an account at all, pretty nice. They're also accepting feedback.

I created a Soup.io account, but as of yet I haven't used it for anything. I absolutely applaud them though for bucking the trend with Web 8.0 businesses or whatever version they're up to yet by using a name that's SPELLED PROPERLY. Even in 1997 I was worried about the name "Rubenerd" being a concatenation of Ruben and Nerd, but at least that's not just misspelled for the sake of being misspelled.

See I think that's why Pownce failed, "Powncers" just doesn't sound as cute as "Twitterers" or "Tweeters". If you're a Soup user, does that make you "Souper duper?". I think I'll soup now. STOP NOW, I meant to say I think I'll stop now. Pownce.

The Pownce export notice on the Settings page

Last week I talked about the closure of Pownce, my last message on Pownce, and the fact I had used the new export feature on Pownce. I'm only two sentences into this post and I've used the word Pownce three times. No wait, four times. Including the title, five times. Wait, I forgot the image above: seven times. Pownce.

This afternoon I finally received my long awaited and highly anticipated email letting me know my data was exported and ready for download.

Your export files are complete.

You may download your files at:
http://pownce.com/settings/export/

Please stop by as soon as possible to pick up your files. Once Pownce is closed, on December 15, these files will no longer be available.

Thanks!
The Pownce Crew

There's just one problem; upon clicking the aforementioned link and logging in, I'm presented with the alien error page instead!

The Pownce 404 notice screen thingy

I guess they're dealing with a lot of traffic this afternoon, or morning, or whatever time it is. I don't understand time zones. I mean I understand them, I've just never been able to wrap my head around how someone on one side of the planet can be experiencing a completely different time of day to myself. It makes sense without making any sense if that makes any more sense.

I'm still trying to decide what I'll use my exported Pownce file for. Could you imagine if all the hundreds of Pownce messages were imported into this blog, one message per post? What a deliciously disastrous and utterly unusable idea :). I guess I could create a sub category to contain them, and have them not appear in any RSS feeds except for that category feed.

I guess this message should really have been tacked onto one of my previous Pownce shutdown posts (Goodbye Pownce, I Hardly Used Ya, Pownce export feature now available) but there you go. Preserved for posterity:

Sorry to hear things didn't work out for the Pownce team. Good luck at Six Apart guys.

The Pownce export notice on the Settings page

Shortly after I blogged about the demise of Pownce (Goodbye Pownce, I Hardly Used Ya), I received an email in my inbox (as opposed to receiving an email in my dishwasher) from the Pownce folk that they're shutting down. I already knew about this obviously, but what I didn't know was that they were kind enough to offer an export feature so our data won't become dust in the wind when they finally go offline:

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

It's not as clear cut as they say; unlike del.icio.us which takes a few hours to generate an exported file, Pownce claims it will take several days to process. Still, once it's done they will send you an email along with a file which you can use to import into Movable Type, as well as a generic XML file which should be easy enough to import into most other blogging applications.

As I said previously, other than a handful of messages my Pownce posts were just automatic duplicates of posts I was sending to Twitter from my desktop client. Still, the electronic archaeologist in me likes the idea of having a backed up archive of my Pownce account for posterity once it goes offline. Who knows, perhaps my grandchildren will be doing a school report on Kevin Rose at some point in the distant future and I'll be able to provide them with material from the short lived, mythical Pownce site. Yes, you'd better believe it.

My Pownce profile with the closure notice

I admit to shamelessly copying the title for this post from Om Malik's latest blog post on GigaOm; it was just too clever to pass up!

It's official, Pownce has been bought by Six Apart and will promptly be shut down by the middle of this month. Pownce was another clone of the Twitter microblogging social network that had a few more extra collaborative features, but it just wasn't better or different enough to justify most people moving over.

I used Pownce (http://pownce.com/rubenerd/) for a period of time earlier this year, but only because my desktop Twitter client at the time also allowed you to simultaneously post to it. I thought the interface was a bit cleaner and more interesting, but at that point I already had several hundred followers on Twitter as well as all my friends. When I moved over to TweetDeck for my desktop Twittering (I've changed Twitter clients, again I ceased updating my Pownce profile.

For what it's worth, I was never quite comfortable with the idea of having all my shared media part of a closed or gated site like this; it's the same reason I don't put anything of value or substance on my Facebook profile either. A Twitter approach which keeps the underlying messaging infrastructure simple with links you post yourself to media you want to share makes much more sense, and is infinitely more flexible. Brightkite (which I reviewed back in October) is a perfect example of this kind of "ecosystem" approach where multiple sites and services are used together to create something wonderful.

I wonder how Jaiku is going under Google these days? I had a Jaiku profile (http://rubenerd.jaiku.com) which also used to be updated with the same Twitter desktop client software I used in the past too, but since moving to TweetDeck which only posts to Twitter I let that wither as well. It makes you wonder whether Identi.ca stands any chance at all.

I've been direct messaged on Twitter a few times by people wanting to know how to set up Twhirl to send tweets to Jaiku properly. They've already got Pownce set up just fine with their username and password, but their messages aren't getting through to Jaiku.

The problem is, unlike the Pownce password field, Jaiku needs your API key, not your password. To find out what your API key is, login to Jaiku and click the API link at the bottom of the page. The page that appears will have your API key.

Enter your Jaiku username and the API key into the two text boxes in Twhirl, then enjoy having your tweets appearing on more than one site! This means you can keep in touch with people on three separate services, plus it makes you look like you're putting even more effort into your Web 8.0 life, or whatever version the 1337 media people have decided to assign to the intertubes now.

These are my profiles if you're interested on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.