Leo Laporte Leaving Twitter. Will Jaiku Become Popular?
Leo Laporte announced today he was leaving Twitter. Not because he doesn’t like Twitter–he’s a huge fan, in fact, but apparently, people are confused that his podcast network TWiT and Twitter are somehow related. And, of course, they’re not. To make it perfectly clear, he decided to leave Twitter altogether.
Now Leo is popular enough that any “social networking service” he uses will be swarmed. That’s exactly what happened to Jaiku today, which is what Leo decided to use instead. I sort of experienced this phenomenon firsthand when I decided to start my own FireWall-1 mailing list back in July of 2000 (now called FireWall-1 Gurus). This was back in the day where I was actively helping people with Check Point VPN-1/FireWall-1 and was thus quite popular. Once I announced my intentions to start this community and focus on it exclusively, people followed by the hundreds.
My use of Twitter has had nothing to do with Leo Laporte. In fact, I probably started using it before he did. I have built up my community of “friends” organically over the months–friends that collectively mean more to me than Leo Laporte’s presence, or lack thereof. The loss of Leo isn’t going to deter me from using Twitter, and in fact may help ease some of the growing pains Twitter has been going on.
I might give Jaiku a look now that Leo has settled on it, but quite frankly, I’m already on too many places as it is. Unless Jaiku’s got something Twitter doesn’t and I can easily bring my friends over (or they decide to move), I’m probably going to stay where I’m at.
