LibraryTechtonics

Last week, I created an account on Jaiku. Since the recent librarian invasion of Twitter, there’s been quite a bit of attention on the whole texting the world phenom in the library blog world. As with the advent of any new service that builds off of a current-but-new paradigm, the common question is, “What’s the difference again?”

I spent some time on Saturday playing with Jaiku, being a seasoned Tweet freak, and the differences are mostly based in features and cosmetics. Currently, Twitter is all text with links, and a nifty URL converter that automatically takes long URLs and makes them TinyURLs (although it tends to be a bit wonky sometimes). Jaiku, on the other hand, takes your Presence feed (the analog to the Tweet feed) to the next level.

Jaiku allows you to bring in feeds from other sources to be posted to your Presence feed, including Flickr feeds, news feeds, your blog feed, and other feeds of your choice. Currently, I’ve got my LibraryTechtonics feed and Flickr account feed all posting to my Jaiku Presence feed, and it’s kinda nifty. I can’t seem to get my Twitter Friends feed to import… I wonder why…

(Really, I’m sure it’s not intentional. It just begs the question ’s all.)

On Twitter, you can reply to another user in the Tweet feed by using the @username: format, then typing your message to them. However, this assumes that you are obsessed with your fellow Twitterati, and you reply as soon as they post a Tweet. In the Jaiku interface, you can post a reply comment to individual posts, and the post will keep all of the comments together, more like a blog post with comments. This makes it a bit easier to find what people actually said back to you. Those comments also appear as individual posts in the Friends Presence stream, which an orangish background instead of the blue-green background of the regular posts.

The home page of the Jaiku site has a nifty world map that pops up posts from around the world (when it actually works), but once you register, there’s no way from the interface to get back to that map that I’ve found. I’m guessing they’ll put that somewhere handy at some point, since it would be neat to see a map of the public timeline, or even of just your friends. There’s also a dev/API/project site at http://devku.org, if you wanna play making tools using the API, or just see what’s in the widget queue.

Twitter hit the world first (I think), and has a mass and very devoted following. I myself love me some good Twitter action throughout the day. Most of my non-librarian Twitter friends have mostly been averse to Jaiku, or seemingly unimpressed with the pretty, pretty feature set. My interests constantly lie in the evolution and usability of technology, and so I’ve set aside any loyalties I have to Twitter in order to examine the differences, and try to see where the technology, and the community user habits are going. It’s all an experiment to me. That said, I think that Jaiku is more feature-rich and slightly more usable than Twitter in the long run, and Twitter would do well to pilfer a few things, and make them even better.

Also, I can see the future of Jaiku for me as a guilt-free feed aggregator. See, I haven’t looked at my Bloglines account in who-knows-how-long, mostly because a) I don’t live my entire life online, and don’t want to (although it may *seem* like I do), b) it’s entirely too intimidating to face all of those bolded unread post numbers, and c) I’ve been enjoying interacting with people in the social software sphere much better than reading static content that just makes me feel guilty for ignoring it.

So wait, what’s the difference between using Jaiku vs. using Bloglines to read feeds if they both just aggregate everything to one place? Jaiku is all of the content, none of the guilt. See, if I miss something on my Jaiku home page, it rolls off and away, and I never knew I missed it. I can page back, if I want, but really, I don’t feel compelled to. Add the instant interaction with people and their stream-of-consciousness-living/reporting, and it keeps me connected in a more comfy and casual way.

I want to see more Twitter fans playing with Jaiku, if for no other reason than to aid Twitter in it’s future development. I also want to hear a more detailed answer to the, “What’s so awful about Jaiku, other than it’s *not* Twitter?” question, because for now I think I’m just hearing a whole lot of Bashing the New Kid talk.

Tags: technology