There are a couple of subtle behaviors in the !gnusocial software that don't seem to get much attention, but that I've come to really prefer over Twitter's.

(1) You don't need to be mentioned in an @-reply to see it in your timeline.  This encourages more participation and obviates the need for the ".@" so common on Twitter.

(2) The number in parentheses in the page title is the number of notifications you have, rather than the number of notices/tweets that appear when you click "view X new" at the top.  Who cares about the latter, anyway?