Jaiku smaiku

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”.