What is pownce? Ted from uncov ( now defunct ) put it best:

In case you forgot, Pownce is a Twitter clone whose added value is the resale of Amazon S3 space. It’s written in Python (Django) by someone who rounds floating point numbers using strings, and is only noteworthy by virtue of being co-founded by Kevin Rose of Digg.

After a much celebrated launch ( they actually failed to launch and crashed, then launched later ), and the other typical bullshit circle-jerk activities that accompany launching yet another useless startup in San Fransisco, Pownce fell on it’s face.

Techcrunch predicted it’s demise, and Valleywag gave it an honorable mention on the Top 5 FAILS list of 2007.

And yes, even though Miss Leah has removed the “floating point string Fiasco” from her blog, and removed herself from the online beauty contest ( is there anything lower than that? ), we all remember. Basically the gist of the post was that Leah, who graduated with a Computer Science degree, couldn’t figure out why her code for star ratings wouldn’t work.

The idiot horny geeks on her blog and digg rushed to save their fair maiden, but it was too late. The internet saw that she’s so damn incompetent that she was performing floating point math operations on strings.

One thing can be said for Leah Culver, she knows how to dangle the carrot in front of the socially inept drama queens that inhabit Digg. Back in late 2006 she got a horde of Diggers and their associated companies to pay her money for a laptop, in return for their logo on the lid. Apparently she thought she was really that popular, and it would be great advertising for the companies involved.

Not just any laptop either. She could have ran another contest, gotten $600 and bought a cheap, but sturdy developer laptop. But no no, she needed a hardcore, expensive Macbook.

Back to Pownce, not that there is much to go back to. Pownce is a failure, like 99 out of 100 “startups” that don’t do a damn thing. Sending files, notes, etc to all my friends at once? Hi, welcome to email.

There is one thing consistent about Pownce though, it’s downward traffic trend. It’s about to drop out of the top 100,000 sites, and has never come close to touching Twitter, it’s top competitor.

As for Leah, she’s still posting high school CS grade code snippets on her blog and asking how to fix them. Her latest solution to the tiny urls problem involves a pile of Python vomit that could be replaced by a single configuration change in Django’s URLDispatcher.

But hey, she’s a cute girl! With perky breasts and she knows how to program! And more recently, she was featured on the cover of Technology Review, with the words “The next bubble?” written over her mouth. Pownce lauded the article, but apparently doesn’t understand what “The next bubble?” means.

Luckily, Pownce is self invested, so no capital has been wasted on this project. On the other hand, Leah has hinted in interviews earlier this year that Pownce is considering capital. From who? I need their address, if they are willing to hand out money on bullshit ideas like Pownce, I can definitely pull enough to retire.