It was hard for me to start writing this week. Suffering from a combination of writer’s block and a series of allergies made it tough to put words on the screen. However, there came from the Internet a significant amount of chatter that the writer’s block or sickness didn’t matter anymore. The discussion among those focused on microblogging and all of its derivates was centered around two major selloffs. First, Powers of N was purchased by the Twitter group. Powers of N made a handy little program called “I Want Sandy,” which was a cloud computing reference system. The user could email the time of the meeting to those who needed to attend and cc the email to Sandy. Sandy would then translate the message of the email and format it to any calendar program. Sandy could also recall any information sent to her by the user. “I Want Sandy,” and the rest of the cloud programs supported by Power of N will be turned off before the end of the month. Sandy was a significant example of the Internet being used as “public memory,” and it will be missed.
The second bit of bad news came from Pownce as they were bought out by Six Apart. Pownce was microblogging service that incorporated the ability to post video and other mediated sources in a very fluid datastream. Pownce never had the audience of Twitter and Pownce was lost in the shadow of Twitter and other social media service. Six Apart is also shutting down Pownce before the end of the year. I guess that this leads to two points that I want to address. The first, shorter point is that the closing of Pownce makes it more critical to use services such as ping.fm as a way a keeping the public discourse from dying if one of the microblogging/social media services decides to shut their doors. The second point to take from this how the economy is affecting the tech industry and by extension the virtual economy of the Internet, in a more distinct way when compared to the dotcom bubble burst of the early part of the decade. As described by other tech writers, there was a considerable amount of turnover in the tech industry in the first half of the decade, which lead to a higher level of innovation and the rebirth of the “garage corporation.” Facebook, Twitter, and other “Web 2.0” products were created during the downturn. It would seem that we are on the verge of the next “cottage industry” moment of the industry. However, the question that must be addressed before the tech sector can advance to “Web 3.0” is the impact of funding. That is, with the economy being affected across the board instead of merely the tech sector, where will the funding come from that will help fuel innovation?
