I cracked. I read Uncov’s post on Pownce. I still don’t know what it does. More important is the chart Ted Dziuba posted with it.

Pownce, despite being a shitty service, gives us some insight into the Web 2.0 world. I have described this before, but it is best done with imagery:

• Useless service X is released after 2 months of MySQL/CSS development.
• Arrington covers it, thousands of users signup. Mike takes his ad revenue.
• People either stop giving a shit or realize your service does not solve any problems for them.
• Fail.

Source:Valleywag

The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.

“>Fake Steve Jobs is Wired’s Leander Kahney. Former editor Nick Denton’s meticulous analysis of FSJ’s prose leads him to believe a fellow ex-Brit is the pseudonymous Steve Jobs blogger. It isn’t just wrong, it’s patently ridiculous to Kahney’s colleagues — the guy’s just not mean enough.

Drunk employee crashes 365 Main’s colocation site. A tipster uses credible inside knowledge of 365 Main’s operations to pass new editor Owen Thomas a timely, credible story that turns out to be completely wrong. The story delivers 145,000 pageviews worth of wrongness. Lesson: Even autistic sysadmins can be full of baloney.

Mark Zuckerberg cashes out. A rumor published at midnight on a weekend during the holiday season gets sprayed all over the Net inside of an hour. Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher shows up at my door in person to tell Owen he’s a frigtard.

They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle — you didn’t expect anything there.

5. Apple TV

Cable TV was going to be dead by Christmas. Instead, Forrester Research reversed its bullish forecast, placing Apple TV behind Jam Packs for GarageBand.

4. Googlephone

Valleywag editor Owen “Wrongway” Thomas repeatedly insisted all year that there was no Googlephone. He was almost right: Google’s only built a phone software platform, one which launched with no killer apps or interface innovations. Don’t drop your iPhone just yet.

3. Facebook ads

“Once every hundred years, media changes,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared moments before unveiling an overhyped ad system for broadcasting your purchases to your friends’ Facebook pages. Even if Zuckerberg proves bizarrely right about media, he picked the wrong day. A hundred years from now, the history books — or whatever replaces them –will talk about YouTube instead.

2. DRM-free music

Cory Doctorow is finally happy, but face it: DRM-restricted music and video files weren’t the repression of personal freedom that evangelists like Doctorow made them out to be. They’re merely irritating when they don’t play. Copyright crusaders are like medical marijuana advocates: You can’t argue with them in theory, but in practice you know what they really want is the right to party hearty — or in this case, to download music not just free of DRM, but free of charge.

1. Tesla Roadster

The all-electric sports car really would change the mass public’s attitude toward electrics. If only it would hit the road. The company missed its promised ship dates, and genius founder Martin Eberhard has been ousted. To be clear, Tesla’s electric motors work just fine. Gossip says that Tesla’s electric motor is so strong that it breaks its gearbox. The company has acknowledged that its custom-made two-speed transmissions have proved a problem.

Special Achievement Award: Pownce

Never confuse celebrity with software. Videogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose announced a new company that would do something radically different. Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog. But to date, I still don’t even know what Pownce is — NO DON’T TELL ME LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING! Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains it for me. As for Pownce’s cyberlebrity status, Ted adds, “their daily traffic is now less than 2girsl1cup.”

(Illustration by Uncov. Photo of Google Android by Mobile magazine. Photo of Leah Culver by Brian Solis)