Microblogging service Pownce announced today that it has been acquired by Six Apart, the blogging software and hosting company behind Moveable Type, Vox, and TypePad.  Pownce will shut down two weeks from now, on December 15.  Buyer Six Apart says they are “very sorry the site will be closing.”

Founded by Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka, along with Leah Culver, Pownce worked as a microblogging application like Twitter, but with the added ability to embed and share other content like audio, video, and photos with your micro-messages. Although Pownce was the application with more capabilities, it never caught on with legions of users as Twitter did.

Pownce developers Culver and Mike Malone will join the Six Apart staff, where they predict “we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.” Tech and social media bloggers seem divided as to whether the acquisition will mean that Pownce’s features will be incorporated into Six Apart’s varied offerings. Mashable thinks not, Stowe Boyd and ReadWriteWeb sound more hopeful.

Whatever the outcome, people will watch with interest what Malone and Culver, and the whole Six Apart group of blogging services, will be doing, given Six Apart’s recent announcement of an 8% reduction in staffing.

Pownce users can export their trove of past content with the tool here.