Teach42

Based on the recommendation from the Art Guy and the ‘tweets’ from Bud, I decided to sign up for Jaiku.

After using it for just a few minutes, it became very clear that Jaiku has quite a bit more to offer than Twitter does. You can aggregate multiple RSS feeds into your Jaiku ‘stream’ (like Flickr, del.ico.us, your blogs, etc). As several people have mentioned, you can even roll your Twitter feed into your Jaiku feed. Also, you can add comments to other people’s Jaiku posts. All very cool stuff.

It sort of reminds me of two services that were very similar several years ago, but one clearly had a better feature set: Furl and del.icio.us. I always freely admitted that Furl had a superior feature set. There were tons of reasons why Furl was far and away better than del.icio.us. And yet I definitely liked del.icio.us better. Why? It was simple. When I bookmarked something, all I had to think about was tags and description. Done and done. It didn’t do much, but what it did, it did well.

I think that’s why I’m leaning towards Twitter right now. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but I don’t need it to. I’d be worried about people overloading their Jaiku accounts with so much stuff that it becomes overwhelming. A few updates per day is perfect.

Other comparison points? Right now I can only find two clear places that Twitter is a winner. 1) The badges for Jaiku kinda stink. I really like the Twitter badge I have in my sidebar right now. 2) People who visit my Twitter page can see my Twits as well as my chosen “TwitterRoll“. Not the people I have as friends, but the people I choose to follow. Subtle difference. Doesn’t look like visitors to my Jaiku page can see that.

I’ve still got an open mind about it, but for the short term, I’m still pretty happy with Twitter, and not ready to jump ship on it yet. But if I’m wrong, let me know!