I’ve been using Pownce for a few days now and Twitter for some time (after resisting for a very long time). I am still trying to understand whether Pownce will succeed or not. After all Twitter has critical mass, Evan Williams, and a loyal fan following. On the other hand, the first private beta of Pownce has some heavyweights behind it and a vocal early adopter crowd (much like Twitter did).

So what are my first impressions of Pownce. First things first. The site is gorgeous. As to its utility, Leo Laporte hit the nail on the head while discussing Pownce on net@nite. Pownce, at least in its current incarnation, is more of a next generation IM app than a microblogging app, which is probably the best way to look at Twitter. The ability to divide your friends into sets and the default of messaging only your friends is definitely appealing and is likely to attract people not into sending tweets to the world, but focusing on a few friends and family. The AIR interface is really cool as well, albeit limited and a little unstable at this point. Pownce definitely needs to add mobile capabilities, the best part of Twitter, and a better mobile client.

The big question. Will I, and the rest of the world, continue using it? I suspect yes, especially if the developers make the moves that everyone suspects they will. I also have a feeling that Jaiku might end up picking the short straw in all this. It is one of the few services I have signed up for and rarely used. Just can’t figure out why I might want to do so.

Update - Changed the title of this post cause I found that Scoble had one with the same title