In surprising news today, Six Apart has announced that they will be acquiring Pownce for an undisclosed amount of money but Pownce will cease to exist come December 15th. As VentureBeat points out, this looks like a move to acquire skills and people rather than the service. A quick look at the Pownce timeline showcases some unhappy users which is to be expected.
Pownce Users Not Happy
The official Pownce blog contains instructions on how to export data from a Pownce account. The tool will create an export file that can then be imported into Vox, TypePad, or WordPress. As for those who purchased pro accounts, looks like they will be receiving an email with additional information within the coming days.
I have no idea what Six Apart has in mind for the Pownce team members but it could be interesting. Also, this signifies that Twitter is the cream of the crop in terms of microblogging services. What will happen to Jaiku or Plurk? This situation is also a good opportunity to think about what would happen if Twitter ended up with the same fate. Hopefully, they would also provide export tools but considering their size, their userbase, etc. I doubt we’ll be seeing Twitter going away anytime soon.
As I conversed about this story with PatrickD on Twitter, he made a great point:
patrickd88@jeffr0 Twitter had the advantage of being first. Nobody could touch it. The only service to almost take it down was itself!
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
From the Six Apart blog:
Boy, am I glad I didn’t sign up for one of those. Honestly, a free TypePad account is like a punishment — and some users might not even realize it. Think about this: after a year of using TypePad, users will be locked into the service. After a year of blogging at TypePad, users will have permalinks at username.typepad.com, and if they decide to leave, those links would be broken. The only way to get around this is to use domain mapping, which isn’t a big deal, but some of those Pownce Pro users probably don’t want to spend money on a domain name.
It’s sad to see Pownce go (even though I never used the service), and I feel sorry for those users who had Pownce Pro accounts, who now have TypePad accounts for a year. If they wanted TypePad accounts, they could’ve just bought one instead of Pownce Pro in the first place.