Rui CarmoThis morning, all of a sudden, pretty much everybody I know this side of the Atlantic dumped Twitter and moved en masse to Jaiku, through a considerably creative arrangement of underground invitation economics (no, I don’t have any. Shoo. Go away).
Thing is, I’m starting to find it a bit crowded there.
I have endeavored to trim down my Twitter contacts to a manageable amount (and refuse connections with folk I don’t know), but Jaiku does things differently (and confusingly) – all of a sudden I have 24 “followers” who have, in fact, given me permission to receive their updates, which was not immediately obvious.
Also, brief experimentation with their S60 application revealed some shortsightedness, in the sense that the thing apparently tries to phone home using XMPP and spewing all kinds of information that I really don’t feel like sharing with their servers – why they couldn’t do it all over HTTP and enable me to trim down the amount of junk sent is beyond me.
I also find Jaiku’s IM bot to be somewhat of a nuisance, since I couldn’t care less about links, threading or my contacts commenting on someone else’s threads. Yeah, I know it’s configurable (somewhat).
Fortunately their mobile site is pretty usable – so much so that I actually prefer it on my desktop. Usability-wise, I’d say Twitter (when it’s working, of course) has a significant edge there – Jaiku seems to try to do too much, and becomes too confusing viz Twitter’s “river of twits” approach.
And, of course, there are no free lunches – today was the first day (ever) that I got an error page:
Kind of appropriate to have Tweety there, don’t you think?