Web2.0 users are a fickle, unfaithful bunch… Initially, I was a little annoyed at the sudden interest in jaiku. After all, I love twitter and am patiently waiting for stability and features to come along. But, having played with jaiku for a couple days, I’m considering switching.
The two services are extremely similar, but jaiku has a few more features. The “killer” feature is commenting. Unlike twitter, you can comment on jaiku entries. Twitter-ers already do their best to emulate this via “@user: blah” formatted updates. But, that is far from perfect.
Other things I initially didn’t like about jaiku:
- it encourages you to put all your feeds in your update stream. I thought this would get old awfully fast. After all, I use a news aggregator to read my rss feeds… why would I want to use jaiku as a second-rate newsreader? But, it turns out that when I add someone as a friend, I can select which of their feeds I want to follow, if any. Brilliant!
- no mobile or IM interface like twitter has. I bet these are coming, as there is an API. But, if not, I can simply use twitter for my mobile updates, and these updates will be sent to my jaiku page via RSS. And people can still comment on it. Cool!
- no way to manage comments, that I could see. This seems to have been addressed now, as I have the option to delete comments on my updates. problem solved (except no way to ban an obnoxious user, but I bet that will eventually show up, too).
- no auto-update like twitter does. Or should I say did… Twitter went from 2 minute updates to 10, to not even mentioning it anymore… So, in both cases I’m hitting refresh a lot.
So, I am considering making the switch, even though there are good chances that twitter feels the pressure and rolls out these same features in short order. What to do?? Well, starting tomorrow I’ll be making all my web-based updates on jaiku, to see how it works out. Feel free to join me! Hey, a lot of you ended up liking twitter, no? Give jaiku a try… I am at http://richardtodd.jaiku.com/.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:42 am
I agree with your post here, I have used twitter for quite a while - but I’m growing slowly more disappointed with it by the day. The service is consistantly unavailable, lack of features (as you mentioned), and to be fair - I love Jaiku’s interface much more.
Feel free to add me on jaiku - mattharwood.jaiku.com :-)
April 12th, 2007 at 6:05 am
added. I liked twitter for broadcasting my status, but everyone wants to try to converse on it. For that, you might as well make use of comments. It’s just a better fit. Once someone makes an app for java-based phones like the blackberry, it will be 10x better.
April 12th, 2007 at 6:24 am
On the refresh thing - you probably know you can auto-refresh a tab in FF? I *think* it’s a Tab Mix Plus feature.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:15 am
@Eyal, yeah, that’s true, I should have thought of that… I use FF on my PC laptop, but not on my macs (I use camino there, which is built on mozilla codebase but can’t use FF plugins).
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:06 am
[...] translate into trading, but the answer revealed itself in ….. WallStreak! First there was Twitter, then came Jaiku, and now it has evolved into WallStreak. What is WallStreak, you say? Well, if you [...]