Twitter v Jaiku

Brian Solis has a great wrap-up of a developing (and inevitable) collision between Twitter, the reigning social presence flow app, and Jaiku, it's less well-known but worthy competititor. Leo Laporte's now well-known defection to Jaiku from Twitter has led to a lot of folks checking Jaiku out for the first time. Solis characterizes the impact of that break this way:

[from Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat? Let's Ask Those Defining the Landscape]

[...]

Now, there is a line in the sand. A division between Twitter and Jaiku. No one thinks that two can survive, that this tournament of arm wrestling will divide the community.

However, I don't think so.

Both offer points of value that will appeal to different market segments (left and right) as well as those who can enjoy playing both sides of the fence (the middle).

[...]

Back in December I joined Jaiku to test it out and I had this to say:

[from Jaiku by Stowe Boyd]

Basically, you are pushing out status messages to a list of buddies (and the whole damn world, if you want to) like Twitter, including by texting on your cell. The added wrinkle is that Jaiku allows you to add RSS feeds from your blogs, Flickr, and del.icio.us accounts, so that Jaiku becomes the pulsing bloodstream of your online identity.

I returned to Jaiku again in March, after I had become a confirmed Twitterholic:

[from Trying Jaiku As A Better Lifestream]

I was fiddling with Facebook today, to see if it could be tweaked into being a better single stream for all my traffic, and I managed to crash Firefox by putting Technorati tags into a Facebook 'share'. I have decided to continue using del.icio.us bookmarks because I can tag them, even though they feel awfully static.

The answer might be to add more streams to Jaiku. I have included my Last.fm recently played stream, the Ambivalence feed, and I have the nice folks there trying to figure out why Upcoming.org RSS feeds don't work (missing the '.xml' suffix?). I already had Twitter and Flickr streams there.

One nice thing about Jaiku: comments are possible on all stream items. Look at this screenshot, based on an interchange with Petteri Koponen of Jaiku. Note that the initial start was a Twitter that was streamed into Jaiku.

This comment notion is great, and provides an interest new dimension to social presence flow. In Twitter, we do something similar by direct messages to others, or via a 'shout out' into the stream by writing a message with an '@' preceding a person's name: "@ briansolis - nice post". [Note that the latter spontaneously occured on Twitter, invented by some savvy user. It's not a supported feature.]

But in Jaiku, comments get added to the initial message: a neater solution.

Also, Jaiku has the flavor of a tumbler blog as well. Various flavors of elements in the stream are denoted with different icons. Any sort of RSS feeds can be flowed into the traffic, and passed along to your downstream buddies. In this way, it actually feels much more like a Facebook profile page than Twitter.

Both Twitter and jaiku are mobile, although at the moment Jaiku is only supported natively on S60 phones. Jaiku's ambitions with mobile seem more advanced than Twitter, involving a sophisticated client on the phone that supports presence and messaging. Twitter is limited to SMS, at the moment.

So, is this the final bout for supremacy in social presence flow apps? I don't thinks so. It's early days yet, and the apps are rudimentary at the moment. I think we will see a lot of innovation, as well as efforts by the majors to get involved -- either by acquisition or by their own efforts.

tags: twitter, jaiky, leo+laporte, brian+solis, twitter+v+jaiku, social+presence, flow, traffic+and+flow

Comments

[Stephanie Booth]

I personally think that one of the strengths of Twitter (setting aside the service availability problems we've been seeing lately) is that it "does one thing, and does it well".

I use both Jaiku and Twitter. I send my Twitter feed over to Jaiku, but I still use Twitter to update it. I usually check out what my "pals" are upto on Twitter rather than Jaiku, because Twitter contains (nearly only) stuff that was *manually* added to it, whereas Jaiku has a lot of "automatic" things in. I'm often more interested in seeing what my friends have "manually" found worthy of telling their friends about. And every now and again, I check out Jaiku to see if there are any interesting things going on in their wider online life.

[J S Zolliker]

Love Jaiku. The only thing I dont like about it, is that it is too web-based. It needs widgets, IM, twitterrific, etc, to make it more friendly, more accesible, more massive... just as twitter is. Otherwise, I dont see it seizing-up

[Rowan Nairn]

Isn't that a bit like asking who will win the battle to host all the blogs in the world, Blogger or Typepad? As soon as new methods of communication become ubiquitous, they become standards, not services. The web always moves to a model of distributed publishing and independent aggregation. It has to.

[Dylan]

Stephanie is right on with the "does one thing and does it well" aspect of Twitter. I look at it this way: I use Last.FM to track my music "presence" -- a history of what I've played, used to get recommendation to and from others; I use del.icio.us to track bookmarks in a similar way; Vox is used for blogging, and Twitter is a dual nanoblog / snapshot of an event, thought, etc. that's on my mind.

Each of those is really useful for me for it's intended purpose, but doesn't work well for others -- I could try to blog on Last.FM as there's a journal feature, but that's not it's strength in my opinion.

Jaiku's strength seems to be the ability to pull all those streams together. Yes, you could use it instead of Twitter, but it's just as easy to put your Twitter feed to Jaiku because Twitter, for me at least, is easier to update (thanks to Twitterific).

[Kayla]

What Stephanie said reflect my thoughts exactly. Twitter has a much more personal feel and really seems more for friends. Jaiku would be good for more professional posts and to collect your feeds that you wouldn't mind anyone reading. But lately I am questioning what we really do "mind" these days... :]

[vaspers the grate]

As Scoble has said, speed, ease, and simplicity will win the day.

I agree with you that we are seeking a single portal for all our flows, plus a way to hook up larger stretches of net highway, like Yahoo Pipes.

[Edward]

Somehow I managed to sign up for Jaiku long before it tipped the tuna, so I had some stuff in it when it caught fire over the weekend.

I like the lightweight approach to connecting your stuff together. It's not as real time as Twitter - feeds have a noticable lag - so you can't chase your pals around from cafe to cafe with it accurately. That's OK.

With all these things the origin story is more important than the feature set. Jaiku is from Finland via mobile phones; Twitter is from SOMA via blogs and that web 2.0 stuff. Other relevant similar services betray their origins, whether it be Plazes Berlin roots or Dodgeball's New York City start. If you recall the old "situated software" story from Clay Shirky each of these solve some local problem in their city of origin that extends to the relevant part of the world that's close (enough) to matter.

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