At TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has been trying both Twitter and the upstart Pownce.
Twitter was launched by Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Odeo, whereas Pownce comes from Digg's Kevin Rose. The key points? Arrington says:
Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two services. I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway. And many of the unique features of Pownce -- like file sharing, group messaging, etc, are handled pretty well already by ... email.
People use Twitter to quickly tell the world (or at least the people who care) what they are up to and what they are looking at on the web. Like blogging, it's a one-to-many application that works very well. Twitter does that perfectly, and does little else. Pownce does it, too, but all the other features are really just distractions.
It's doubtful whether anybody actually needs either application, of course, but it always helps to have a head-to-head that includes personalities as well as programs.
