Techmeme and Techcrunch launch Pownce
Following the lead of Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis, who are trying to cash in on their successes and big name status in the Silicon Valley by launching new ventures (and getting tones of bloggers’ response in return), Kevin Rose of Digg-fame has launched Pownce which happens to be a mix of Instant Messaging (in the Twitter mode) and social networking.While at first glance there doesn’t appear to be anything new with Pownce, Techmeme and its swarm of blogs/sites and Techcrunch (with its sizeable RSS subscriber list) have made sure that this me-too product gets maximum coverage.
I have often said that the comments in Techcrunch are better than the write-ups. One commenter on Techcrunch explains that the Silicon Valley of 2007 is the same as the Grunge scene in the first half of the 90s – all roads led to Seattle and being too place centric, Grunge went down after that.
The question arises: will a self-obsessed, Hollywood-like Silicon Valley, led by a group of pied piper bloggers/columnists bring a similar fate to the Web 2.0 boom?
A good write-up on Techcrnuch can get you some VC money but it is no indicator of success, whatever a select band of RSS subscribers may say. These readers are most probably not your end users.
By the way, dear Kevin Rose, aren’t there problems with Digg itself?
When was the last time you all discovered a good story on Digg?
How about improving the Bury feature?
Labels: Digg, hype, techcrunch, web 2.0
posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:41 PM
2 Comments:
excellent point about location, which is why i live in north carolina. check it out:
skype: scandinavia
facebook: boston
myspace: LA
all three of which totally DOGGED the bay area as far as "crossing the chasm" is concerned.
How about youtube, flickr, digg, twitter? All tiny cliques of talented coder-centric types who respectively:
a) focused on launching something crazy
b) are REALLY out of "garages", not the pretentious bay area web 2.0 gimme-gimme-vc scene
c) came up with their ideas during the dark ages BEFORE web 2.0 hype
Silicon Valley is full of talent, but can you even IMAGINE a worthy seattle grunge band after Nirvana? capital can't drive innovation; only a measure of true separation from the "industry" can lead to the kind of user focus that is necessary to drive Web 2.0 innovation.
- Srini
I was half expecting an announcement somewhere on TC, but trying to "search" for Crunchbase leads you no where. And this is in small part because searching for something only gives you a small number of queries (five) without any links to any prior entries (you can get around this by adding "&paged=x" where x is the number of pages back you want to go, however).
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