Tag: microblogging

Jaiku needs to do something quick!

Post ImageLike many others, I’ve noticed that Jaiku hasn’t been working correctly in recent weeks. It is slow, and the API has been really unreliable, as I noted on Sunday (on Twitter of course). You’ll recall that Google bought Jaiku back in October, and sadly, it hasn’t been the same since.

The main advantage (for me) that Jaiku had over Twitter was that it was incredibly reliable. I coded the "My Status" widget that appears on the right side of my blog to use Twitter originally, but switched to Jaiku after I realized how unreliable Twitter was. This week though, I switched back – because Jaiku is the unreliable one now.

Company founder Jyri posted a note yesterday, acknowledging the neglect and assuring us that good things are on the way. That’s a step in the right direction, and I’m glad the Jaiku team got some R&R over the holidays, but what if it’s too little, too late?

Here’s why Twitter works better for me:

  • There are way more people on Twitter, and it’s pretty easy to discover new people that might be interesting to follow.
  • Twitter’s mobile site is far better than Jaiku’s. I’ve always got Twitter Mobile open on my iPod touch, and it works great.
  • Twitter works with my cell phone. I’ve never been able to get Jaiku to work. Maybe it doesn’t like Canadian numbers or something.
  • Far more third party sites and utilities work with Twitter.
  • I much prefer the @username system that Twitter has over the "proper" comment system that Jaiku has.

I hope the Google/Jaiku team can make progress on Jaiku this year. It would be great for Twitter to have some solid competition (and no, Facebook doesn’t count).

How about you – do you use both? Which do you like better and why?

Read: Jaiku Blog

Google buys Jaiku – why?

Post Image Today microblogging service Jaiku announced that they have been purchased by Google. I came across the news via a barrage of Twitter updates this morning, and it wasn’t long before everyone started wondering why Google chose Jaiku over Twitter. It seems that most people feel Jaiku is the superior platform technology-wise, but the community at Twitter is better. I’d more or less agree with that statement. For instance, I chose Jaiku to display “my status” on the right side of my website instead of Twitter because the reliability and performance of Jaiku was just so much better. It still is.

Marc Orchant has a great post on the topic. Scoble thinks that Google made the move for Jaiku because of Facebook. He suggests that Google is gearing up to launch some major competition for Facebook on November 5th. That may be true, but I like what Ross Mayfield had to say better (though he too mentions Facebook):

But perhaps the greatest direction they can go with this is lifestreaming.

With Google’s savvy around structuring the unstructured, picture lifestreaming evolving into something that infers permalinks for social activity.  One day your Google homepage may be a stream of your friends and what they are doing, sharing, and adopting.

Yes! Enough of this manually updating my lifestream already, let’s make it update automagically. Even better, give everyone a lifestream by default. That idea gets me excited.

A follow-up post from Scoble highlights that Google has built themselves a “very strong position in the RSS ecosystem” as they now own Google Reader, FeedBurner, and Jaiku (which imports/aggregates RSS feeds). Very good point indeed.

Now the question is – who will snap up Twitter?

Read: Ross Mayfield

Tracking Tweets at Twitter

Post ImageTwitter launched a killer new feature last week, the very aptly named “Track.” Sometimes when I am thinking about something, I wonder how many other people are thinking about that something at the same time. With Twitter and the new Track feature, there’s a way to find out:

You can follow friends on your phone through Twitter, but what about concepts? What if you wanted an update anytime anyone mentioned your name, your favorite band, “NYC,” “earthquake,” or “Steve Jobs?” In real-time? What if you were attending an event and wanted to know who else was there?

That’s what Track lets you do. It’s dead simple to setup – just send “track mastermaq” to Twitter, and you’ll start receiving all messages that mention my nickname. This is really powerful stuff. In addition to the usual ego-tracking, I am also tracking edmonton and podcasting. It’s like a whole new world has opened up!

If you’ve been holding off on trying Twitter, I strongly encourage you to do so now. Especially if you’re in the marketing industry. Where else can you get notifications every time someone mentions your product or service? This is the future, today.

Now if only Twitter was more reliable…

Read: Twitter Blog

Get ready for micro-media

I wrote another guest post for the Vidfest blog, this time on micro-media. It’s a topic I expect to be talking about a lot more in the coming weeks and months. While relatively new, the concept of micro-media is incredibly powerful, and I think micro-media services will have a massive impact on the way we live and work. I’m already addicted.

Take tonight, for example. I went to the Justin Timberlake concert here in Edmonton (it absolutely rocked btw, more on that later) and I was able to communicate my thoughts in real-time at Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, and others. That’s not all though – other people were able to communicate with me too!

Another example is news. I really don’t like newspapers, and I find myself reading online news sites less and less. The reason? I get all the headlines via the BBC and NYTimes streams on Twitter.

There’s some cool stuff happening, and I’ve given it a lot of thought lately. I like where micro-media is going so far.

Anyway, check out my post, and let me know what you think!

Read: Vidfest

Scoble and his sheep

Post ImageI think Robert Scoble is a really smart and passionate guy, but man does he ever herd a lot of sheep! In the last few months, Twitter has grown incredibly fast. So fast that Obvious Corp. is trying to offload Odeo so that they can focus on Twitter. And it seems to me that the growth is largely due to Robert pimping the service.

I don’t really have a good way to back this up, other than noticing the trend in my aggregator. Before Robert started talking about Twitter in almost every post on his blog, it was rare for me to read about Twitter in any of the other blogs I subscribe to. Lately though, it’s like clockwork. There’s probably one blogger a day who announces they have “given in”, “succumbed”, or otherwise been “forced” to join Twitter. It always goes something like this:

I heard about Twitter a long time ago and thought it was useless. Now though, I have decided to try it out, and Scoble’s right, it’s great!

They don’t always mention Scoble, but often you can trace it back to him. Maybe he should be asking the Obvious boys for referral money!

The one notable exception to the trend (remember, this is just based on the feeds I read) is Darren Barefoot, and even he mentioned Robert!