Twitter and Pownce

Platforms like Twitter and Pownce enable people share their thoughts in a literally public manner--you post a thought or a description of whatever you're doing, you'll never know who's going to jump in this conversation and what responses people will pop up with, as long as you post "publicly". Not only online, but also in real life in that microblogging system would send posts and direct messages to cellphones if the owner has connected his/her phone with the system. However similar in basic ideas behind, they do have differences which let each one of them stand out and survive in market competition.

Differences between Twitter and Pownce

• In Twitter, I can follow anyone that I'm interested in, then his/her updates will appear on my main page. I can send message to that person and I have choice of sending it publicly as default or privately as a @message. In Pownce, I am not allowed to send message to a person only if I add him/her in my friend list and he/her accept the application.
• In Twitter, I can only post as much as 140 characters; but Pownce allows me to post as much as I want.
• Twitter only offers 5 choice of importing friends from other network excluded within your email account contacts. However, Pownce allows importing friends from 4 networks and 4 email accounts, which totally add up to 8 choices.
• Twitter allows users to change the default color of preset themes. Moreover, one can upload any pictures to set up as background. General users of Pownce only have 12 choice of background pictures and cannot change the color. It requires money, $20 a year to be a pro-member to enable one to adjust his/her theme.
• Twitter only support posts in words; however, one can upload audio and visual files at Pownce within 100 MB max, and 250MB for pro-members.
• For personal profile, Twitter only offers one MORE-Info URL you can add into; with Pownce, one can link his/her other profiles including social networks and instant messengers as well as websites.

microblogging

http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
While I was exploring possible educational usages of Twitter, I found another microblogging tool, edumodo, which was established with educational purpose at the very beginning. On this post, Ways to use Twitter in academia were suggested to readers: 1)Class chatter 2)Classroom Community 3)Get a sense of the world 4)Track a word 5)Track a conference 6)Instant feedback 7)Follow a professional 8)Follow a famous person 9)Grammar 10)Rule based writing 11)Maximizing the teachable moment 12)Public notepad 13)Writing assignments. No.9 and 10 are innovative to me. Daily language use is notoriously lack of grammar accuration. However, the writer treats the inconsistant usage or abuse of grammar as a chance for students to aware and learn the rule of language underlining conversation: without rules/structures, say punctuation, language can be vague and not understandable. Those hindering rules can also be productive if you can take advantage by manipulating rules that you want your students to follow. No.4 is also interesting to me. Simply by tracking a word, you can build your own corpus lively seeing how other people in this world are using the language.