Lindsay's first Advent calendar

Lindsay got an Advent Calendar from her Oma (and Opa) filled with chocolate last weekend and today she opened the first "window" to find her surprise.



Thanks Oma!

I remember when I was a kid my mother had a big Santa pinned to the closet at the end of the hall. And every morning through December until X-mas we would rush to find the surprise in today's pocket (eventually we figured out it was the one with the bulge).

Now it's my daughter's turn.

Pownce shuts down

Pownce announced today that they were closing their doors and taking their technology to Six Apart. I had an account there, but rarely used it - it was essentially like Twitter for file sharing.

It's tempting to say this the recession affecting the web. And it's probably true that the usual rationalization and consolidation is happening now that valuations are down and some people think they can make some good investments and others think they should take the money and get out before things get worse.

On the other hand, there's a lot of duplicate services out there - for alternatives to Twitter checkout Jaiku or Identi.ca to name others where I'm a lurker. It's not surprising that some of the minds behind ideas (business and technology) want to opening cooperate (and compete internally) rather than compete openly.

And the consolidation is good for the end-users too. Platform developers can concentrate their efforts and there will be a lot less jumping around trying to follow friends on one web site or another.