So, back to Nik’s point that Twitter is better because of the API.

Absolutely correct. But when we were standing in line last week for our iPhones Pownce’s lead developer, Leah Culver joined us and we talked at length about where Pownce is going. She said that she’ll expand on Pownce’s feature set, but wasn’t ready to commit to an API yet. Already, though, Pownce is available on Facebook and there’s an Adobe Integrated Runtime version of Pownce, so she is keeping up with some of the kinds of apps that Twitter has seen developed for it.

She has biased Pownce’s feature set toward scalability rather than sheer features or wide-open invitations (you can only use Pownce if you get an invite from someone on it already and those invites are limited based on how able Pownce’s datacenter is to keep up with it). Pownce has been faster than Twitter’s Web page to come up because of this bias.

Its interesting, I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce.

I can’t take many more social networks. These are worse than email and that’s just the “are you a friend?” requests.

But, anyway, I still like Twitter the best. Why? No complications. It does only one thing. I find that on my cell phone I go back to Twitter before I go back to any of the others. It’s lightweight.

So, why is Pownce taking off? Better UI. Kevin Rose. Better UI. Kevin Rose. Heheh. Just kidding. But not really too far off. The designer who worked on Pownce is awesome. Love the look of Pownce and little touches like little ads in between messages. I also like that I can send messages just to my friends, or to the public.

Translation: I don’t get how all of these are going to survive. People will tend to go with the one that their friends are on and most of my friends are on Twitter or Facebook.

What do you think? Which one is going to end up being the most popular? If you’re on one of these, what feature would get you to switch? If you aren’t using any of these yet, why not?

Will Leah’s bias of scalability over APIs and features pay off? Or will Twitter’s decisions pay off for it?

UPDATE: Along these lines is this video of Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku, which competes with both Twitter and Pownce.