I have been using both Twitter and Pownce for a couple of months now. Most of the time I looked at both Twitter and Pownce as the same service. Yes Pownce was slower than Twitter. . .and yes Twitter has more outages than Pownce. The more I use it the more I begin to understand the community that uses the service. This is what makes the two services different.

Being a Digg user I learned about Pownce before Twitter, so I got a Pownce account first. Only having 2-5 friends on Pownce didn’t keep me interested enough to keep using the service. Then a couple of months ago I went through and began adding friends of friends. I looked at it like ‘if they’re friends of my friends, they might share some similar interests’. The outcome was great. . .I was meeting more and more people and I learned that these websites were basically social networks. Until then I hadn’t really looked at it in that way.

I began to see the potential of Pownce as a source of content. People post links to articles, pictures, and media that they are reading/watching that they liked. Using threaded comments was a cool feature too(since twitter didn’t do this). It is nice to put something up there and have one place for everyone to comment/respond.

Then I signed up with Twitter, I didn’t like the UI at all. It was harder to read messages, replies. . .harder to see the links, I just didn’t like it for some reason. So I went back to using Pownce and used it for a week or two. Hearing more about Twitter I decided to give it another chance.

Which was great. I learned that Twitter was more about ‘miscellaneous thoughts and commentary’. This engaged me more because it didn’t have pictures/video. . .and really only did conversations.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people use Pownce for casual conversations. . .but my experiences show me that more people on Pownce reply to media links. And of course I’m not saying people on Twitter don’t click on media links. . .because they do. I just don’t see them respond as much as they do on Pownce.

Then again, and I have said this before, Twitter/Pownce is what you make of it. Only have 1-5 people as a friend and you won’t see much activity. However, because I see things this way I will only post media to Pownce. . .and I will post casual talk/links to articles on Twitter. A lot of people combine their Twitter, Pownce, and even Jaiku accounts. . .but I think the communities are different and want different content.

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