We talked about more than Pownce and Twitter in this interview. Leah Culver is a developer who launched many projects. Pownce was just the highest profile of them. I asked her about it because I'm insanely curious about why it didn't crush Twitter.
Here's what I saw from the outside. In March 2007, when Pownce launched, Twitter didn't have much of a head start. It only had about 250,000 members, and Twitter's site was still unstable and often inaccessible. So Pownce launched at a good time. Plus it offered more features. Plus it had a real revenue plan with its premium accounts. Plus it was backed by Kevin Rose a Web celebrity with geek cred. Why didn't it win?