Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart (Movable Type, TypePad and Vox) and will close their doors on December 15th.  Pretty lame if you ask me.  People spend a lot of time developing communities, updating profiles, pictures etc etc, only to have the founders (Leah Culver and co.) bail after a year and a half.

I think this shows the volatility of investing too much time and energy in Web 2.0 projects.  And Pownce wasn’t just any social network, just last year The NY Times called Pownce “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley”, Digg founder Kevin Rose threw his reputation at the site, and invitations were being sold on ebay.

Data portability would be really helpful for these situations.  And it seems a bit serendipitous that Facebook Connect has launched on the same day.  Personally I’m routing for the open-source protocols like OpenID, but any move towards data portability is a move in the right direction.

www.pownce.com/castig