Socialization.

Well, the latest movement afoot in my neck of the woods is trying out Pownce, yet another social platform. Thanks to Cole Camplese, a handful of Twitterites have moved over and are, like myself, straddling the two systems. There have been several tweets by others who have (one guesses) previously tried Pownce, but I'm not sure you can really decide unless you give it that old college try. Being who I am, I also include the ability to go mobile with the platform, as I am always on my BlackBerry (mom's CrackBerry, as my kids affectionately call it)  and I think that has become an integral part of the social experience. So here are the little things on usability that I've noticed.

• On a mac at work, I have interacted in Twitter almost exclusively in Twitteriffic, a great little app with a small footprint that sits on my desktop and keeps me in the loop. I love it because it's small, but there. I can ignore it, I can follow it, I can go off to a meeting, come back and catch up quickly. Better still, being a keystrokes grrl, I love being able to reply or direct message with simple keystrokes so I can basically get straight to my own tweet.  The only downside I experience is that occasionally I miss some tweets, and not sure I know why. Usability: A-

• Pownce has a nice looking interface, and I really like the threaded discussions. At first glance, it looks slicker than Twitter. More sophisticated. But does this really mean it's better? I have to actually go to a webpage and, sad to say, I don't do that often enough. This might be a trainable point, but do I really want to be trained? Usability: B