Jaiku or Twitter

Recently I got into Twitter and eventually (when they started allowing invitations again) Jaiku.

These mobile blogging platforms appealed very much to me as I have been struggling for quite some time to find the time and (more importantly) motivation to keep up sizable, respectable, worth-while posts on any blog.

These led me to understand just how important blog posts containing more than 140 characters (the limit on Twitter and Jaiku) really can be, especially when attempting to rouse up discussion on deserving subjects.

Perhaps this is why the introduction video to Twitter suggested that the service is simply a gap-filler for between-post events that are not large/important enough to merit an entire post (i.e. mowing the lawn, seeing the Oscar Mayer Wiener-mobile on the highway, etc.).

Well, it just so happens that both platforms were undergoing a bit of a face-lift when I was getting into them.

Leo Laporte (whom I have never heard of) apparently was a Twitter user, and decided to move from Twitter to a small company called Jaiku. Apparently Leo had quite a following, as his switch made news headlines over much of the internet. Not only that, it caused "the Leo Effect" whereby many Twitter users also abandoned Twitter for Jaiku. This overwhelmed the Jaiku servers, and they struggled for quite some time to regain control of their bandwidth and increase their capacity.

Well (as always) someone at Google was apparently paying attention, and lo-and-behold, Jaiku soon announced that it was being absorbed by Google.

Then, just in the past day or so, Twitter announced (or denied, depending on what article you read) that it is experimenting with adding advertisements to its Tweets. It also release that it's tired of "footing the bill" for you to send Tweets via SMS in some countries.

So, one one hand, you've got Twitter going with ads and retracting SMS features from some countries, and on one blog I saw I noticed that there were rumors of them creating a corporate product.

On the other hand, you've got Jaiku supporting RSS feeds (kind of, I'm having some issues with it right now), and being absorbed by Google, which was good for Blogger, Picasa, and others. Jaiku also does icons, which I can take or leave, and they don't support sleeping the SMS delivery like Twitter, so I just turn my phone down when I sleep.

I'm switching to Jaiku full time for now. We'll see how it goes...