The Future of Laziness

As you may or may not have already heard, Pownce is shutting down on December 15. As a Pownce user, of course I find this disappointing, but I can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t bringing in enough cash to cover all the expenses of running and developing a site like that.

I had a bit more investment in Pownce than your average user, having developed a project using its API. In case it’s not obvious, yes, Ounce will be shutting down as well. If you’ve been giving out your Ounce feed URL, I suggest making a post on Pownce to let people know they can unsubscribe from your feed.

I originally joined Pownce because I wanted something better than Google Reader’s shared items. I never really got involved in the community, but I’ve become quite fond of it as a link blog. Now that it’s going away, I’m going to have to find a replacement. Shared items have advanced quite a bit while I was gone: you can now add your own comments and share arbitrary links, which were the two complaints that prompted my exodus in the first place. But I’m not sure I’ll go back, because there are other features I’ve become accustomed to, like oEmbed.

So I’m not sure yet where my links will go in two weeks. This might be just the excuse I needed to finally write my own blogging engine (something I’m told every developer does at some point as part of our natural life cycle). That would certainly be the blunt surface approach.