Leo Laporte, the podcaster of note over at the TWiT network, has announced that he is leaving Twitter for Jaiku after being responsible, to a large degree, for much of Twitter’s popularity after he discussed Twitter shortly before SXSW a little while ago (here is the episode of Net@Nite where Leo and amber interviewed Evan Williams, Twitter’s creator).
The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing. And it hasn’t helped the confusion that I’ve been such a fan of Twitter. I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship. But we don’t. And the proliferation of programs like Twitbox and sites like Twit This are not helping things much. So let me repeat…
Twitter has nothing to do with TWiT.
And, I’m afraid, I can’t have anything to do with Twitter, either. It’s just fueling the confusion. Fortunately, there are several similar services including Groovr, Dodgeball, and Jaiku. After a cursory glance at all three Jaiku seems to have the best mix of features for me (I’m too old to be groovy, or hooking up) so I’m moving to Jaiku. (In truth, it offers a much richer set of features than Twitter.) My handle is ChiefTWiT. Hope to see some of you there.
I registered on Jaiku and found that it really doesn’t look all that different to Twitter:
There is a client for Series 60 Nokia smartphones (2nd and 3rd edition phones only at the moment although there is a Java client in private beta) which I installed on my phone. The client wanted to start broadcasting details of my diary (which I’m not keen on) and managed to drain my battery through an apparently constant connection (which switched on when I turned my phone on even though I had shut the client down previously).
I suppose the big question here is whether Jaiku will supercede Twitter? I think time will tell. The answer will likely depend on the interface options, the costs involved and the communities on each.
(Source: Scobleizer)
Another great use for Jaiku is as a kind of meta site where you can aggregate a number of content streams in one location for use as a kind of ongoing update stream.
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jaiku, twitter, status messages, feeds, imported feeds
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