Twitter v. Pownce?

This one is going to be tough, because I don’t really think that Twitter and Pownce should be compared in a traditional context.  These are two very different tools that focus on different things:  Twitter is the spur-of-the-moment update, with not much more purpose than a sneeze.  Pownce, on the other hand, is a bit more like a bar, where you can keep various conversations all going at once, and (as it says on the box, “send stuff to your friends”).

The problem that I see however, isn’t at all about comparing whether one is better than the other, but how I’ve subconsciously created an overlap between them.  A mental obligation to say something in one, when I may have just used the other.

Pownce is certainly the full value meal when it comes to features when compared to Twitter’s single can-has-cheeseburger lunch.  Which is nice.  There’s a formality to it.  For example, there’s a useful way of sharing a link to something to all (or a group of) your friends.  But when I use that, I still end up throwing the link in Twitter, to accommodate my friends that have chosen not to use Pownce for whatever reason.  So, because there’s a split in the audience, I still want the things I say to go to both groups with as wide a reach as possible.  Just because someone I know has decided to take favor in one over the other, doesn’t mean I should not share my information with them.

This is where the awkward overlap seems to be, for me.  Not in the functionality of the tools, or the interface, the target audience, or even the people that built them - but in how I find myself using them in a real day.  They have neighboring blocks of memory in my brain, and I kind of feel like they both showed up at a party wearing the same dress.

I haven’t decided yet how this will be resolved in my routine, but it’s a classically good example that how you look at things on paper, versus how you end up using it, can sometimes be two very different things.

Food for thought.

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