If you are not on Twitter, or if you are not following any of the top 10 people on the twitterholic list you probably haven’t heard about Jaiku. A good part of twitts in the past week dealt with bashing this new service, praising it, discussing it’s merits and etc. Leo Laporte, a former top 5 contender on twitterholic actually completely jumped ship. I figured that if all the cool kids are doing it, it might be worth while to check it out. After playing around with it for few minutes I kinda realized that this is probably how Jaiku came to be:
Web 2.0 Startup Foundr: Did you see that Twinttor thing? That is fucking tits! I want that. Can you copy it?
Web Designr: Sure thing chief.
Web 2.0 Startup Foundr: But I want it better… More web 2.0-ish.
Web Designr: Twitter is pretty Web 2.0 already…
Web 2.0 Startup Foundr: No, I want more. I want like rounded corners, and like cutesy little icons all over!
Web Programr: And we could make it, like, import feeds like Tumbr and shit!
Web 2.0 Startup Foundr: YES! Do that!
Asshole from Maketing: And we need ads or some product tie-in.
Web 2.0 Startup Foundr: Goes without saying of course…
This is exactly what Jaiku seems to be. A Twitter clone with a more polished, professional look, a Tumblr like feed import feature, and some sort of advertising deal with Nokia. All in all it is not bad. I signed up and imported in all my feeds into the service. You can find my jaiku profile here.
I still prefer Twitter because it focuses on simplicity, usability and extendibility instead of a rich feature set, or graphical design. Besides, now Jaiku will pull in my Twitter feed so all my twitts will show up on both services.
[tags]jaiku, twitter, status, twitt, web 2.0[/tags]
Hi Lukasz.
It’s understandable that Jaiku looks like a Twitter copy-cat for new comer, but that’s far from the truth. We started last year with main focus on our mobile clien for S60 phones.
If you want to know more about Jaiku’s history, there’s a good interview at 606tech: http://www.606tech.com/fullarticle.php?artid=492
Joi Ito also blogged about our background http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/04/08/jaiku_vs_twitter.html
By the way, a picture of S60 phone on Jaiku page is an advertisement for our mobile client, not for Nokia phone. We clearly need to tweak that ;-).
Cheers,
Teemu
Thanks for the info. Nice to see that the site has a dedicated team ready to jump in and clarify stuff like that.
And yeah, that phone picture looks a little bit like advertising. Also the “win Nokia phone” thing in the sidebar looks like an advertising tie-in. :) Not that there is anything wrong with advertising mind you.
Supposedly once you install the client that banner thing gets replaced something else, no? I think I saw it on Leo Laporte’s Jaiku page – like an activity badge or something.
Luke, yes banner gets replaced by automatic presence information from phone. See e.g. my page: teemu.jaiku.com. There’s automatically picked location (via network cell ids), phone profile and nearby people (via Bluetooth device scanning)
That is pretty impressive – if you have the right phone for it. :)
Twitter will probably get most of my attention for now, since most of my friends are there. Granted, you guys do have some interesting stuff going on feature wise.