Jordan Wollman Creative Direction

Goodbye Pownce!

Although this is certainly not new news (as it was announced a few days ago), I can’t help but think to myself, “What on earth was SixApart thinking?!” Here’s what, from my perspective, happened.

SixApart laid off 8% of its workforce, bought Pownce, and then shut the service down.

This brings to mind another buy-out that went completely different. Remember when a little search company bought a little video community website? Yeah, YouTube sold for $1.65 billion to Google, and guess what? Google, for the most part, left it alone. If anything, they made it better, gave it more resource, and expanded the service. Only two years and some change later have they slipped the needle in and added in-video advertising.

They got permission from the YouTube fan base to do so by leaving the service much the same for a time, and then slowly adding change that wasn’t paradigm-blowing. But SixApart? What did they gain by shutting down a service with a loyal user-base?

From my perspective, as a Pownce user, they got a whole lot of alienation. I won’t be visiting SixApart for their blogging tools - I already have one I love (WP) - and certainly won’t entertain a “reboot” of the Pownce service. In the end, all they’ve really acquired is a talented few people who came from a great concept and are going to be “allowed to grow and explore” by a company who destroyed what they had built.

Maybe I’m being overly critical, but this just seems like a huge waste, and an even larger mistake. I hope they have some aces up their sleeve with this one, because at this point, I’m out.

Thoughts?

Behance, makers of great creative-minded products like Action Pad, as well as the social network Behance Creative Network, both of which I use, have announced a new product online called Action Method, which I played around with for a few minutes this afternoon.

At first blush it looks to be a competitor to online project management tools like Basecamp and ActiveCollab, but targeted to the Mac-toting, Google Chrome testing crowd. But, after a bit of playing around, it seems to be much more, and in some cases, a lot less.

It’s certainly slick, pretty, and streamlined. I venture I would work more efficiently, and possibly even collaborate better using this tool than some of its competitors. However, the lack of domain options and customization leave a lot to be desired, as well as the lack of ability to segregate clients from collaborators. I’m not a huge fan of sending my client to a corporately labeled website, and asking them to sign up to collaborate.

I’m sure that problem will be resolved in the future, but for now it’s a blaring hole in the concept.

Some of the terminology they’ve adopted is cute, but might give them that differentiation they need to draw the creatives. Additionally, an Adobe Air application is available as a download so you can run this tool on your desktop. Very slick idea, and a great way to spread the news via the Adobe Air network.

In any case, after playing around with it for a bit, it’s got tons of potential to be a strong competitor to the current kings. I’m certainly keeping my eye on it, and hey, i’ll even use the free account for a few side projects, and see how it pans out to Basecamp, which we use at Ariamedia, and ActiveCollab, which one of our clients, Fish, uses.

Macworld provided an in-depth review of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro’s. Good review, but the thing I found most interesting was something of high concern to me. No Firewire of any sort on the MacBook’s… Bad news for anyone who’s used to that work flow.