When Pownce launched about a month ago there were a lot of people quick to call it a Twitter killer simply because of who was behind it and the fact that it offered a few features that Twitter didn't. I wrote then about how I don't need another inbox to constantly be checking, but on the same note if it was actually better than Twitter then it would make all the sense in the world to switch - but it would need to prove to be useful. So in addition to my Twitter account (which I use all the time) I set up a pownce account as well and thought I'd just start using them both and see where I ended up.

If you take the time to scroll back through the archives on both of those accounts (which I highly don't recommend) you'll see that I pretty much kept using Twitter the way I had been, but with Pownce I tried to use it the same way I tried to use Twitter but quickly gave up on that. Then I started using it as a MP3 server for sharing songs with friends, that lasted about a day or two. And then I pretty much stopped using it for anything noticeable. Initially I was checking it as much as I checked my Twitter account but as I mentioned there recently it seems like Pownce just keeps getting harder to deal with while Twitter keeps getting easier.

One example of that is how Twitter recently changed their rather confusing freind/following set up to the much easier to understand following or not system. This made things easier. An example with Pownce is the ability to group friends. I originally thought this was great and ran through and set up a bunch of groups, but it doesn't scale because as more and more people join Pownce, I have to go through each new friend and see what groups they should belong to. This changes a one click system of adding a friend to several minutes of sorting. This also leads to unneeded drama if someone finds out they are not in one of your groups, but think they should be.

The drama aspect is something else that to some extent keeps pushing me away from Pownce. You might remember my note to everyone when Pownce first launched about how people where flipping out that people didn't think they were important because they weren't in on the first round of invites. Unfortunately for whatever reason, maybe because of the folks behind it or because who the core of initial users are, but Pownce seems to invite the drama. I've heard more people complain about things they wrote on Pownce not getting replies from the people it should have, how this person rated a post a 5 but rated someone elses post a 2 and how that clearly means something, and how blah blah blah. I don't even want to spend any more time thinking about all that crap.

The mobile aspect is a really big point of this as well. That's something I love in Twitter and might be why I haven't fully latched on to Pownce. In Clive Thompson's fantastic Wired News piece on Twitter he notes how the constant stream of updates from friends creates a bit of a social sixth sense. This is exactly what keeps me going back to Twitter, the flow of life from my friends there. With Pownce, the posts seem to be less about what people are up to and more about "go check this out" which while it has it's usefulness, doesn't create that feeling of connection to what is going through your friends minds at any given moment and so you don't get that same mental link up.

The point I'm getting at, is after a month or so of trying to use both services just to see what direction my usage habits would push me in I seem to be still very happy using Twitter several times a day, and don't look forward to checking Pownce every few days. This isn't a condemnation of Pownce, it's just me observing that at the moment I don't think I'm going to keep using it as Twitter fills my needs better. None of this is finite, and new versions and features could cause me to rethink this entirely, but at the moment I think I'm done playing around with Pownce.