Famous podcaster Leo Laporte yesterday announced that he would no longer use Twitter but move to their Finnish competitor Jaiku. Ok … but he also wrote:
In truth, it offers a much richer set of features than Twitter.
leoville.vox.com
Honestly? I don’t see any advantage of Jaiku over Twitter. None of them has an SMS gateway in Austria, and Jaiku seems not even to have an official API yet (it currently seems to be work-in-progress under devku.org). On the other hand, what is cool is, that you can directly comment twits Jaikus without having to twit in response ;-)
They also offer a software for posting from your smartphone without having to send SMS, but they only seem to support a certain Finnish mobile phone builder …
One thing that currently really bothers me about Twitter is the performance of this service. There simply have been too many downtimes during the last couple of weeks for me. But it remains to be seen whether or not jaiku can stay online while the TWiT army is moving over ;-)
So far (after about 10 minutes of use) Jaiku looks to me like a nicer version of Twitter with Nokia-bias and with a big gap in the documentation area. For example I couldn’t yet find an equivalent to the SMS control commands Twitter offers. This might have something to do with Jaiku more focusing on desktop and smartphone users while Twitter focuses more on GSM/SMS users (at least that’s what it looks like to me). So at least for me, both services are targeting different audiences. What both of them are still lacking for me, though, is a simple web interface for mobile devices.
So in the end, there is still a place for a 3rd party to develop a slim, fast page for mobile devices that ideally will allow you to post to all of these services if you want.
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