Morrie the Toupee Salesman

As I’ve said before, one the shocking things I found about California, is how many people there are saying really, really stupid stuff (and often getting paid for it). Case in point is a post on some random blog by Muhammed Saleem about something called the “Pownce Effect.” Its part of the leadup to some random conference, where lots of other people are presumably going to say the same kind of dumb stuff. In the article, he says that Pownce is a failure (generally in comparison to digg) for 4 reasons:

1. The Cult of Personality. It’s hard to summarize what his point is here, because it’s just completely unfocused. Something about “everything Kevin Rose touches turns to gold,” until Pownce. Which, uh, wasn’t ever true, except in the minds of the same twits that believe this article. And Pownce somehow proves that it wasn’t ever true, ever.
2. First Mover Advantage and Network Unportability. This can be summarized as “Twitter came first.” Doesn’t really work, because there are countless cases of “second-movers” winning. digg for example.
3. Evolution, not Revolution. Again this holds up digg as somehow revolutionary, and Pownce as just a small evolution over Twitter. Except that digg was really just an evolutionary step over sites that came before, like Kuro5hin and del.icio.us. Believe me, I was there.
4. Artificial Success. Here he says that the problem was that Kevin used digg to promote Pownce, and that that was somehow not right. He’s almost got it, but is also woefully wrong, since Kevin used the Screensavers (you know , that TV show) to promote digg.

The striking thing about this is the list of sponsors on the right side of the blog where this is posted. Making up stuff based on other made up stuff seems to be a thriving business.

Also please don’t take this as in any way an endorsement of Pownce, the site I still refer to as dontellowen.com. I’ll never use it or endorse it. But I try not to write really stupid shit about it, either.