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.
