It’s official. I now have more friends on Jaiku than Twitter. It also occurred to me that I haven’t seen a list a of Jaiku-related tools. Here are some of the ones I’ve run across.

SMS

The main problem right now is the lack of SMS integration, at least for a subset of Jaiku users. It seems that customers of CDMA users in the North America are having problems receiving the activation messages required to link their mobile to their Jaiku account. GSM carriers seem to be working okay. We’ve been told that the long-term solution is a US shortcode and it will take a few weeks to make it active. In the meantime, the Jaiku are manually activating (linking) Jaiku accounts to mobile numbers.

IM

Given the potential number of updates, I think I still prefer IM integration. I use the IM+ client on my Treo 650 (though they support a wide variety of Palm, Windows, and Java-enabled phones) in lieu of SMS. It allows me to both receive updates and update my presence.

• IMified – This is a cool service all by itself, but particularly useful are the WordPress, del.icio.us, urlTea, Reminders, Todo, Notes, Google Calendar, Twitter, Jaiku, and Twitter+Jaiku widgets. I was looking today at how to create your own widgets and I have a feeling I’m going to be giving that a try sooner rather than later. The IMified guys also say the Jaiku widget will soon support notifications just like the Twitter widget.
• Anothr – Anothr is an IM bot which allows you to read RSS feeds. It will work okay for getting Jaiku updates until IMified adds notification
• WordPress Plug-in

Mobile

• Jaiku Moblet – A mojax moblet to directly interface with Jaiku through the Jaiku API.

Desktop Applications

Many of these application are still very early in development, but they show that apps are being worked on and will definitely compete in functionality with any of the Twitter apps.

Cross-platform

• Nitwit
  • Desktop application for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X (screenshot)
  • Works accross many protocols like Twitter, Jaiku, Jabber and IRC
  • Multilanguage (french, english and more to come)
  • Extremely simple interface
• Jaiku Gadget – Gadget for Google Homepage

Mac

• JaikuGrowler -Peter Rukavina’s JaikuGrowl is an AppleScript that allows you to receive alerts from Growl whenever you or any of your Jaiku contacts emit a new “Jaiku”.
• Jaiku-Plazes Quicksilver Script – Script to let you update from Quicksilver, works with Plazes to set your location (though it isn’t required).
• Dashboard Widget
• Twaiku – Bwana took several of the Quicksilver/Growler scripts and mashed them together to create Twaiku.
• Juhu – A Mac OSX client for Jaiku

Windows

• Jay-Q – A Windows app being developed by Jeremy Brown. I think it has a lot of potential and has come a long way in just a few days.
• Sideku – A Windows Vista sidebar gadget by Patrick Jakubowski

I know there’s probably other ways to interface with Jaiku out there. If you know of another one, please leave a comment. You can also join in on the fun at the Jaiku Support channel, the Developer channel, or the Jaiku Developer site.

Not for me though. My wife needs her gall bladder removed. She’s been having abdominal pain on and off for two years and it finally got to be too much for her to bear this week. She’s been to see doctors and they all told her they couldn’t find anything wrong.

Even in the ER yesterday, the doctors did an ultrasound to look for gall stones. Nope, she doesn’t have any. Finally, one of the doctors suggested a procedure to test the gall bladder when it contracts (to emit bile). They shot her full of die and then gave an enzyme to make the gall bladder contract. Yep, it’s not moving which is causing her a great deal of pain.

So, in just a few minutes I’m heading back to the hospital and the surgery is being scheduled for sometime tomorrow. Life is on hold for a few days until we get past this crisis and my mother-in-law will most likely be staying with us for a few days next week to help with the kids during recovery.

If you’d like to keep tabs on us, I’ll be posting regular updates to Jaiku.

This is a quick test to see if I can post using the IMified WordPress widget (http://www.imified.com)

Sometimes when you’re on the cutting edge of technology, you have to just take your lumps and move on. Much of the Twitter community and thus the blogosphere and soon to be podcast community is all-a-twitter over Leo Laporte’s decision to leave Twitter over concerns that his new Trademark, TWiT, will be more difficult to defend if he’s using the service.

Not only do I support Leo’s decision to do this for the reasons he stated, but I think he’s actually done something good for a lot of people. He introduced us to Jaiku (or at least me, I think Jaiku actually pre-dates Twitter). Jaiku is similar to Twitter in the sense that it’s purpose is to post mini-updates about your life (Twitter says “What are you doing right now?”). However, it’s got a couple of cool features which, to me, make it a superset of Twitter:

Threaded conversations

Instead of the constant @Joe tweets on Twitter which are used to have a conversation (and why shouldn’t we?) on Twitter, Jaiku supports comments on individual Jaikus (updates). This makes for threaded conversations which don’t require you to “follow” the person to know the person saw your reply. Once you comment on a Jaiku, you get updates about subsequent comments via e-mail and in your contacts’ stream.

The question is, when is the feature to unsubscribe from the comments coming in case you’ve exited the conversation and don’t care about it anymore?

Importing feeds

This is quite possibly the coolest feature about Jaiku. You can add additional feeds to Jaiku such as your Flikr photo stream, your blog’s feed, your Netflix movies feed, your del.icio.us bookmarks, and even your Twitter feed. When new items are found in the feed, they are inserted into your “presence stream” which your contacts can see. Your contacts can individually subscribe and unsubscribe to your feeds.

Look and feel

I really like the layout and design of the whole site. Despite capacity problems immediately following Leo’s announcement, it has recovered nicely and feels very snappy.

That being said, there are still a few things I don’t like about Jaiku (though I’m very confident these things will be addressed):

Contacts

While you do get e-mails when someone adds you as a contact, there’s no real way to know who’s following your updates. Twitter has a whole page which lists who is following you as well as who your friends are.

Mobile

The whole power of Twitter is the SMS and Instant Messenger interface (AIM and Google Talk). You get updates from your contacts, you can add friends, you can send direct messages to them, and you can remove (or just stop following) them.

I haven’t even been able to activate my mobile with Jaiku. The message says it’s been sent but I never received it. The Jaiku team says a US shortcode is coming very soon, it’s hung up in some red tape with the carrier.

There is a mobile version of Jaiku which runs on various Nokia phones, but that doesn’t help me either. I’m hopeful for the Java Mobile version of the application, but I’ve had trouble running Java applications on my Treo.

API

It’s interesting that Jaiku released their developer API ahead of schedule this weekend. I’m not sure if it’s due to the sudden interest in Jaiku or if they just felt it was ready early. In any case, Twitter has a huge headstart in this area in terms of the number of applications and services already under development. I hope Jaiku catches up quickly.

The Bottom Line

For the time being I will continue to use Twitter while I’m mobile and even when at home if I want my Twitter friends to see an update. However, I will point someone to Jaiku if I want them to see a whole picture of my online “presence”.