The crew behind the microblogging site Pownce today announced that they will close the service on Dec 15 and instead join Six Apart. Apparently they are planning to come up with something new and better next year. This raises a lot of questions, for example, what do you do with your content when the site you are using can be gone the next day? With the abundance of social media sites out there, it is inevitable that some will disappear in the near future.
Now, I never really used Pownce on a regular basis, so I don’t care about those messages that I posted. But had it been for example Twitter, I would definitely have to think through if I should do a backup of my messages and all my contacts. I can especially see great value in saving the friends that you are connected to if you wanted to transfer your network to some other place, even if you had to look up people manually.
Pownce have come up with one solution to this problem.
“We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.”
That is a great service, but I think it would be even more valuable if you could export information about your entire network. Fot most of the social networking services I use, the real value is not in the content but in the network.