Yesterday, Six Apart announced to acquire micro-blogging startup Pownce and to shut down Pownce’s service in two weeks. Leah Culver and Mike Malone, Pownce’s main developers, will join Six Apart’s team on similar roles.

Backing by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, Pownce is considered the second-best-known micro-blogging service around after Twitter. Its service even offers more features than Twitter that allows user to share not only short text messages but also photos, video and mp3. However, Pownce’s traffic never took off while Twitter’s accelerated over the time.

There were several reasons for why the service failed like unreliability, late and bad APIs, inconsistency of features etc. yet it appears basically due to that it provides too much while users just require simple service for free.

Kevin Rose, its founder, is known one of the most-followed people on Twitter but his profile on Pownce is almost unidentified. “While I’m sad to shut down the service, I’m excited to join @sixapart as an advisor, cool stuff coming,” he has just updated his tweets 10 hours ago accepting that Pownce would come to nowhere while Twitter who barely supports 140-character text messages has become main stream.