After the discovery of Jaiku earlier this week, I have decided to stop using Twitter.
For those who have no idea what either Jaiku or Twitter are, I’ll start with Twitter.
Twitter is a service on the internet that you and your friends can join, and register your mobile phones and instant messengers against. You can then send a message to twitter via either your phone, messenger, or the twitter webpage, and all of your friends receive that message. You can choose where you want messages to you to arrive too. Twitter keeps a history of the messages you have sent, and provides funky little badges to put on webpages with your last few messages on.
Twitter was a great idea - but it was fairly limited in what it could do. This isn’t a bad thing as such - usually simple services are the best - apart from when you are the 1st generation of a new idea, and the second generation (that improve on you in every way) are on your coat tails…
Enter “Jaiku” from stage left (who pushes Twitter to the ground, and kicks off the edge of the stage).
Imagine if you had something just like Twitter, but it also allowed you to register your blog newsfeed, your Flickr photo feed, your del.icio.us bookmark feed, and any other feed you liked, and whenever you did anything with them, those events were also communicated out to your friends. Think of it as the lazy person’s ultimate syndication system. The moment you add a photo to Flickr, all of your friends around the world have been told about it. The moment you bookmark an interesting site in del.icio.us, your friends have been told about it too.
What’s more, the Jaiku website keeps a nice looking history of these events for anybody to browse - mine is at jonbeckett73.jaiku.com.
I think Jaiku is a great service. It’s free, and in these busy days where we have so little time to go visiting everything we might like to on the web, or spending as long as we might like to catching up with friends, Jaiku provides a wonderful aggregation service - so we can not only go to one place and see a very immediate view of what our friends are doing, but we can have that news sent to us via text messages.
Go and sign up with Jaiku today - and add me as a contact… remember, I’m “jonbeckett73”.