Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn’t joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she’s joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver’s blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that’s in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce’s only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it’s possible the integration of Pownce’s technology didn’t work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku

Before the funding, SimpleGeo was a team of four including co-founders Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. As of today, they’re now 7, with the arrival of two new hires: Zooko (yes, that’s what he’s known as), a peer-to-peer hacker best known for his work on Mojo Nation, a precursor to BitTorrent. And Mike Malone, an engineer at Six Apart who was also instrumental in the building of Pownce, the since-deadpooled social messaging service.

You can read more about Zooko on his Wikipedia page. But basically, he’s done plenty of things that have earned him a lot of respect in the tech world. (And the fact that he has his own Wikipedia page should say something.) Galligan notes that they’re thrilled to have him. He’ll be working from the company’s Boulder, CO headquarters.

The addition of Malone is vital to SimpleGeo as he’ll basically be the face of the company in Silicon Valley, Galligan says. Malone, who lives in San Francisco, will be the only employee not working in Boulder with the rest of the team. Instead, he’ll remain here and will help out whenever SimpleGeo signs a deal with one of the many location-based startups launching in the Valley. He’ll also be doing meetups and going around on the speaking circuit in the area to help spread the SimpleGeo name. He’ll start January 1.

At Six Apart, Malone was doing application development for the TypePad platform, building apps that run on top of the TypePad API. He joined that team after Six Apart acquired Pownce almost exactly one year ago. Given that, the timing of his departure shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. Once the funding was in place, SimpleGeo started looking for a “fantastic Python developer,” and Stump, who previously worked at Digg with Kevin Rose, (one of the co-founders of Pownce, and an investor in SimpleGeo — yes, it’s a tangled web), knew that Malone was their guy.

And obviously, the love is mutual. “SimpleGeo is awesome because location is really useful, but really hard. It requires a lot of resources to do right, and often it’s not your core business. And SimpleGeo has built out an amazing infrastructure that makes location simple and easy. And the team is really amazing,” Malone says.

Alongside the announcement of the new team members, SimpleGeo is also starting the distribution of its beta keys. Galligan notes this will be very limited at first, but that they’ll quickly be expanding it (sign up on their main page). With access to SimpleGeo, you get access to the between 2.5 and 3 billion points that are already in their database, Galligan says. This includes information from Twitter, Flickr, BrightKite, every geocoded Wikipedia entry, and weather data from NOAA. He also notes that Foursquare data will be going live shortly.

GeoAPI, another player in the space, recently announced Foursquare data implementation (among others), but lacks some of the other data points. Both participated in our Realtime Crunchup last month.

Galligan also notes that he and Stump expect to expand the SimpleGeo team to 11 people by February. Yeah, location is very hot right now.

[photo of Malone by Andrew Mager]

TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards.

TypePad Platform and Developer Program

The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden in a blog post wrote that this will also benefit bloggers, whether they’re part of a business or organization that uses TypePad for online publications or individual bloggers who share their life with a close circle of friends and family.

For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects.

Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program website to obtain an alpha version of the TypePad API for free, with commercial versions of the TypePad Platform set to debut later on. Time will tell if the initiative will end up creating an ecosystem of third-party developers much like rival Automattic has managed to assemble for WordPress over the years.

TypePad Motion

Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities to TypePad, but is now switching to full throttle with the launch of TypePad Motion. The new service is the inaugural open source app built by Six Apart developers for the new TypePad platform and incorporates many of the features of the late Pownce. It’s also reminiscent of Jaiku, Tumblr and the recently introduced Yahoo Meme service.

The service is already live here, so I played around with it a little and found that it was far from anything remotely spectacular in terms of functionality or wealth of features. You log on with your Typepad account and add text (no character limit, links, photos, online videos and audio) to your Motion profile. Other community members can subscribe to your new blog and comment much like any other microblogging / lifestreaming service. That’s about it, although the open-source aspect is interesting for the future.

Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python using the Django framework (GitHub). An example of a customized Motion blog is this showcase for the Future of Web Apps conference where the above announcements were made today.

A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take?

The micro-sharing application was launched the same year in private beta and became somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (which was nowhere near as popular as it is nowadays) and Pownce (which never really took off and was ultimately put out of its misery by Six Apart). Jaiku was famously acquired by Google at the end of 2007 before it hit mainstream success and has since often been cited as one of the search engine company’s infamous zombie acquisitions, with little or no further development happening on the service since the takeover and the original founders moving on to doing other things on the company’s payroll.

Then Google discontinued a number of services in the beginning of this year, and Jaiku was widely reported to be one of the axed products, but Engeström swiftly responded to those reports with a blog post saying that Jaiku wasn’t dying but instead morphing (into an open-source platform for building micro-publishing services on Google App Engine).

Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are.

(sorry about the occasional sound glitches)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4512841&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

Pownce, the media-rich Twitter competitor once labeled by the New York Times as “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley”, is headed to the deadpool after being acquired by Six Apart. The service, which was co-founded by Digg’s Kevin Rose along with Leah Culver and Daniel Burka, will be closing its doors on December 15. Users will be able to export their accounts to other services, allowing them to retain their messages and media, but it looks like Pownce users will have to turn to Twitter for their micro-blogging needs (if they haven’t already). Culver and Mike Malone (Pownce’s two engineers) will be integrated into the Six Apart team.

The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise – Pownce has long struggled in the shadow of Twitter in the microblogging space, despite the fact that the Pownce crew objects to being called a Twitter competitor. There were some major differences: Pownce allowed users to share photos, music, videos, events and offered niceties like an official AIR application, but its core functionality was still very similar.

We first heard about the site back in summer 2007, when it made it headlines as Rose’s secret new startup. Excitement built up to the point that invites were being sold on eBay, but by the end of the year it became clear that Pownce wasn’t catching on nearly as quickly as Twitter, and it seemed like it might be headed to the deadpool before it even launched to the public in January. Even Robert Scoble, who usually embraces social web services, hasn’t updated his account since July.

Co-founder Leah Culver has written a semi-sweet farewell to the Pownce community on the site’s blog.

This video shows an iPhone controlled beer pouring machine that is triggered by the word “Pour” found in a Pownce RSS feed. It does not solve world hunger or cure cancer, but I think the creator’s heart is definitely in the right place.

Digg users/Gizmodo take note: this product, made from Legos, run by the iPhone, and designed to pour an entire bottle of beer into a glass is aimed squarely at your target demographic. Our only improvement? If the iPhone had been controlled by a man in a Boba Fett costume and the woman in the video had been dressed like Leia in the Jabba’s lair I think the true awesometude would have blown this video off the charts.

The road to a better Craigslist is littered with the bodies of startups that could never make it past the first few mile markers. But iList, which launched today out of stealth mode, thinks it can defy the odds by making classified listings more social. The service includes a standalone site, but every listing can be cross-posted to Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, and even Craigslist itself. (See screenshots).

In addition to Craigslist, iList faces competition from Facebook, which runs its own Marketplace app, and other classifieds apps on Facebook such as ShopIt. But iList gets a lot right that other social classifieds don’t.

To start with, it makes each listing very easy to find. When you list an item or service, you start on the iList site which prompts you to fill in standardized data that varies according to the item. If you are listing a car, for instance, it will ask for the year, make, mileage, color, and condition. All of this metadata makes the listings more search-engine friendly than simply putting in a title and description.

But iList is not counting on search engines alone to find your listing. It makes it easy for you to promote your listings to your friends and contacts on Facebook and other social communication services. When you are done publishing a listing, you just click the services where you want the listing to be pushed out to. The listing then appears in your activity stream in those services. You can also automatically create a Craigslist listing.

The Facebook app has some extra bells and whistles. Messages can go back and forth within Facebook, and friends looking at your listing can promote it by re-posting it to their activity feed. Back on iList, you can keep track of who is helping you promote your listings. The more items you list or promote, the more “Karma points” you get, which eventually will be redeemable for rewards.

The San Francisco startup has a 25-year-old CEO, Chris Abad. And one of his co-founders and chief designer, Eston Bond, previously worked at Facebook as a product designer. They raised $1.5 million in August from Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro, Goowy founder Alex Bard, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The screenshots below show how the listing for the Acura on iList above shows up on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Pownce:

Daniel Burka, co-founder and head designer for Pownce, has generated some buzz by posting a screenshot teaser of an upcoming release (shown above).

From what we can see in the shot – a search box, an upload link, and parts of the words “Artist” and “Playlist” – it appears to be some sort of browser-based music player.

Just a couple days ago Pownce started allowing users to post files to the general public, not just their Pownce friends. The micro-blogging format, however, only allows one file to be posted at a time, although these individual files can be played back in a simple Flash player.

This new player might allow users to upload batches of audio files and share them with friends as mixtapes, which would put the service in competition with sites like Muxtape, Mixwit, Mixaloo, and Imeem.

Seen more broadly and in light of recent lifts in file size limits, this could be a sign that Pownce is trying to differentiate itself from Twitter by heading further in the file sharing direction, as suggested by Duncan Riley just the other day. It seems as though Pownce’s already-vague “send stuff to your friends” tagline isn’t broad enough after all.

Thanks Ryan for the tip.

Leah Culver, the lead programmer of Pownce, has informed us that the messaging/social networking service will release a more complete API this Friday, one with substantial improvements over the first version released late last October.

This second version will include the ability to post notes and replies, fetch private and friends-only notes (in addition to public messages and user information), and upload and download files. OAuth support will also be rolled out, allowing users to protect their Pownce data when using API-based services. Services built on the API will be publishable in a Pownce directory where users can find them more easily.

Culver says that API 2.0 is powerful enough that developers could recreate the official Pownce AIR client if they were so inclined. Pownce is already speaking with several partners who have shown an interest in using the new API, including Flock who plans to integrate Pownce into its people sidebar so you can see friends’ messages and post messages while browsing.

SocialThing! and Mahalo also plan to use Pownce’s new API. SocialThing!, a social activity aggregator launching this March, will feature the ability to send messages to friends on Pownce in addition to other sites such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, and YouTube. Mahalo currently relies on a hack to allow website sharing to Pownce through its Share Firefox toolbar; access to this new API will replace that hack.

Culver will be at FOWA Miami this Friday to officially launch the new API. She’ll be speaking there about websites as services and the importance of solid APIs.

So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter. Another feature I like is the fact that you tell it where you are, so location information is included.

Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application. The application automatically adds location information to your photos and updates.

Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos – see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well – which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi.

Update: I’m actually going to re-jailbreak my iphone to test the software – the fact that uploading is so easy and it adds location information is worth noting. If it works really well, this could actually be a reason for me to stop posting directly to Twitter.

According to Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg, the new service is way for users to share short messages with a corporate structure, or with private messaging between different groups. Mullenweg says that although it’s not initially aimed at becoming a distributed Twitter, they are offering the template on an open source basis and that if people want to hack it for this purpose, “you’re welcome to.”

The concept of a distributed Twitter has been discussed in certain circles for the better part of the last year. The concept is to decentralize a short message service, therefore overcoming the constant issues Twitter has with service provision, or in simple terms, many people host the service across many servers, and they all talk to one and other.

Allen Stern at Centernetworks says that “With WordPress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.” Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but the key to Twitter’s success has been three fold. One is its sheer volume of users that has seen it defeat competitors such as Jaiku by providing the most active and rich user base. Secondly although the centralized service is a weakness, it’s also a strength because when you connect to others on Twitter, you connect to others on Twitter. No working out whether the server they’re on is up-to-date, live or even compatible, it just works (when it’s not down, or “temporarily overloaded”). Third is the open access to Twitter via third party tools; just ask Leah Culver from Pownce (who’s not one of my fans) about why open access is vital in building something like this. Prologue may provide some open access, but its distributed nature will mean that ultimately it will be a niche product; possibly a good niche product, but it’s not going to knock the Twitter bird off its perch any time soon.

Pownce, a service that lets users send messages, files, links, and events to friends, first launched into private beta over six months ago. It was founded by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka (Rose and Burka of Digg fame).

Tonight at midnight PST Pownce leaves private beta and anyone can join. There are 150,000 or so users in the service now – users have been waitlisted so that the sole developer, Culver, could maintain site performance. The site is still run with Culver as the only full time employee.

A number of new features are also being added to the service. A new version of their desktop client has is part of the release (version 3), built on the Adobe Air platform. The new version also allows users to directly respond to messages from friends. Previously users had to go to the websites to respond, making conversations more difficult. Burka says this feature allows users to “respond freakishly fast.”

Users can now bypass the tedious process of adding new friends to yet-another-social-network. The new version allows users to import friend lists from any/all of Digg, Flickr, Twitter or Facebook. More services will be added regularly, Culver says.

A big part of Pownce is event invitations, although previously users could only view events via a mini-list embedded in the right sidebar of the site. Events are now also broken out into their own page, with public views as well as lists of a user’s events that they are holding or attending. They can then be downloaded into Google Calendar of iCal format. See last screen shot below.

The most interesting new feature is a group of lists that highlight interesting users. This isn’t just a list of top users by number of friends or number of posts, but a more editorialized list of people who might be interesting to follow. These are called “Featured Powncers” – you can see how they are highlighted in the top screen shot.

Pownce isn’t a Twitter clone, as Culver says repeatedly. To me it’s more of a Twitter “plus” (see our now-dated comparison from last July), since it incorporates file sharing and event invitations as well as simple messages. Pownce also skipped the mobile integration that Twitter is focused on. So they clearly aren’t a clone – but the real question is whether users will be likely to choose just one, or use both. My guess is the vast majority of users will only want to be on one of the platforms.

Pownce is still a distant second to Twitter in terms of traffic, but given that they were in private beta the comparison wasn’t entirely fair (the number of users was highly regulated). The real question is whether users flock to the service starting tomorrow, when the gates are open to all. And remember that Pownce, with a tiny burn rate, doesn’t need to hit Facebook-like numbers, or even a fraction of that, to be a success. They can grow at their own pace. Who knows, they may be here long after many of today’s “hot” startups are a distant memory.

Uncov has a very funny post on the demise of Kevin-Rose-founded-Twitter-clone Pownce, noting that their traffic seems to have fallen to the point that “Even TechCrunch can’t save you now.” The image above is taken from their post.

That may or may not be true, but when you look at Pownce v. Twitter on Compete.com, the difference doesn’t look quite so brutal. Still, there is probably only room for one Twitter in this world, and Twitter itself seems determined to hang in there.

Pownce, previously a one-person shop (developer Leah Culver), has started to hire people and is looking for office space. We’ve also heard Culver doesn’t like Pownce being called a Twitter-clone. But the shoe fits quite nicely in this case, and the clone moniker stands. Sure, there are differences. But it isn’t different enough.

Pownce launched in late June to a surge of interest based around the involvment of the ever-popular Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3), however the popularity has not lasted. Both Compete and Alexa show big drops in traffic from Pownce as users have abandoned the platform, Alexa showing a remarkable 80% drop in traffic. The Pownce AIR client was buggy at launch and the lack of an open API has meant that whilst Twitter continues to grow with the assistance of an ever increasing range of third party apps, Pownce has actually gone backwards.

Culver and Rose will be hoping that the interest in Pownce hasn’t declined to a state where 3rd party developers will not be interested in building for Pownce: it’s really the only thing the platform might have left to arrest its continued slide of user interest.

Today Yappd announced that it was being acquired and the service will be shut down on November 5. Welcome to the TechCrunch Deadpool, Yappd. We hardly knew you.

That leaves Twitter, Pownce and the recently acquired (by Google) Jaiku left in the ring.

Jaiku Founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen today posted this on their homepage:

“While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.”

The terms of the acquisition have not been released.

This is a fascinating move by Google which would have looked at Twitter prior to this acquisition, and Twitter’s recent $5 million series A funding last July.

There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now.

More coverage on TechCrunch UK.

Leah Culver, a co-founder of Pownce with Rose has made a bizarre post to Digg suggesting that Digg’s new features were a direct copy of those from Pownce:

Since I originally came up with the Pownce gender list, I’m somewhat miffed that Digg copied Pownce.

Culver also linked to an image on Flickr which she subsequently deleted.

The first and most obvious question: has there been a complete break down in communications and trust between Pownce’s founders that they now find it necessary to air their dirty laundry (ironically) on Digg? Second: why did Culver delete the picture after posting the link on Digg? Was pressure brought to bare?

As much as we all admire Kevin Rose’s tenacity and creativity, there is always a point where you can be wearing too many hats. Rose has three (Digg, Rev3, Pownce), which I’m guessing is at least one too many, possibly two.

Digg users will now have full profile pages that allow them to connect to friends and share stories that may other wise not hit the main page of Digg.

Digg users will also be able to chat with one and other, and leave messages on user profiles; a similar feature to the Facebook wall.

The news has met with mixed reactions by Digg users, with some suggesting a name change to “Diggspace” may be coming. The group story sharing feature was noted with this comment:

The best part is that if you decide to use any of these new features and spread stories you’re into around to all your friends, you’ll get banned for gaming the system. Great idea!

Notably, the new link sharing features put Digg into competition with Kevin Rose’s other startup: Pownce. It will be interesting to see how Digg builds the features out given the obvious conflict building between the two.

Update: Kevin Rose has now posted to the Digg blog with the changes, demo video as below

Rose also said that Digg was moving towards offering new features in the future including:
* Digg Images: A dedicated images section (with thumbnails). Still on track to launch in late October.
* Revamped Comments: No more ajax loads, new clean and lightweight design (similar to the old comment system).
* Digg Alerts: Alerts will give you the ability to create customized email alerts – when a story becomes popular, summaries of popular stories on specific topics, and when your friends recommend stories.
* Story Suggest: Dozens of servers crunch the math to provide you with real-time recommendations (stories and friends) based on what you’ve dugg in the past.

New features include incoming event notifications, inline video playback, the ability to display social networking links and new preference settings.

Notably though, the additional features are focused on those interacting with Pownce via the web, not the Pownce AIR client. Of course it would be possible for a third party desktop application designer to create a client that utilized these additional features…if only Pownce ever got around to offering an open API; the last we heard of that was July.

The minority of people who use microblogging tools directly from a web page should enjoy the new features.