Twitter Is Dead, Long Live Jaiku!
After getting access to this new beta client for Jaiku, I think I can officially say Twitter’s days are numbered. Unless they do some retooling, or people don’t get tired of drinking from the firehose that is the average active user’s Twitter-stream.
For those who don’t know, Twitter and Jaiku are referred to as “Microblogging” sites. You send in a brief update, others can send brief updates too. You can choose to “follow” people as friends and you receive their udpates. Twitter allows you to do this via IM, SMS, the web, and a number of computer and mobile phone-based clients. Jaiku allows you to do this via the web, via a number of computer-based clients, a WidSets widget (WidSets can be used on most phones that support Java) , and a S60 2nd or 3rd Edition client for mobile phones.
To explain the firehose analogy, for Twitter: all of your “friends” updates appear at once. It’s a steady stream. Quite literally. One after the other. No sense of “context” other than the context you can incorporate to the 140 character updates. Because any two people don’t have the same friends, you can often see half of a conversation. People use Twitter to advertise their latest blog post or any number of things. It’s a stream stream of pure noise.
I believe Ken Camp said it best when he called Jaiku a lifestream aggregator. All of the little droppings that we leave around the net–provided they have an RSS feed associated with it–can be aggregated into Jaiku easily. However, as someone who follows Ken Camp (or anyone else), if I don’t like part of what they are aggregating into Jaiku, with one click I can unsubscribe from that part of their feed, yet still get the rest of their stuff. For example, in all but one or two cases, I’ve unsubscribed from people’s Twitter feeds.
But it gets better than that. While they haven’t solved the asymmetric conversation problem, they’ve made the problem a lot less annoying in a couple of ways: first off, every “update” someone makes in Jaiku is the starting point for a conversation. If someone responds to my Jaiku, that response is maintained as part of my original update. You can see this “thread” essentially begin to take shape by watching the individual update.
Now here’s the cool part: every update my friends make to someone’s thread is shown in my Jaiku stream, either for all of my friends or that specific one. If they are making an interesting comment, I can easily see what it was in response to by clicking on the comment. I get the whole thread. You also get all the responses made to your Jaiku updates in your Jaiku stream, even if they don’t come from friends.”Also, you get all future responses from any Jaiku you respond to, even if the responses don’t come from friends!
If you want to see the new client in action, go have a look at Jonathan Greene’s post where we includes a video demonstration. They supposedly will be making the beta more public in July.
In short, Jaiku is the new king of the microblogging space. Twitter is basically dead to me.
