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Dave Plumber Winer posted a link

Testing Twitabit -- it stays up when Twitter is down...

June 27 at 9:56 am - Link

Tom Morris, Brent Logan, maryn and 7 other people liked this

Dave - you are genius - did you create this? - Maxine Appleby

10 more comments

sounds like was she said to me last night..... - Marc Canter

No, it was created by the team at SwitchABit -- I'm an investor and advisor, but I did not create it. - Dave Plumber Winer

I am over Twitter. It's too disorganized and unstable. Friendfeed is the new Twitter. - Steve Rubel

it's sad to rely on Twitabit to send your tweets - Dobromir Hadzhiev

been trying to get onto Twitter all morning, but "overcapacity" issues...May be choking on its own success..need to figure out how to bring my friends over Friendfeed - mark ivey

Have you tried Twiddict for this purpose? That's what I typically use. http://twiddict.com - Amy Worley

+1 mark "been trying to get onto Twitter all morning..." is customer fail. - Hao Chen

using Friendfeed now... Q to All: why Twitter is so addictive? Your thoughts, pleassse :) - Lora Lufark

using Twitabit and friendfeed seem to be a good combo - maryn

Great idea, but i find the use of ajax incredibly bad, no indicator that anything is happening, I double posted a couple of times because I wasn't sure that my request was going through. Aside from those interface gripes it's a great service to have as a backup. - Chris Jones

Chris: You are correct. We are working on providing more visual feedback. - jay

FYI -- Jay is the lead dev. If you have kudos or complaints, or feature requests, he's the guy to talk to. :-) - Dave Plumber Winer

Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter

“Why isn't Jaiku discussed much as a serious Twitter competitor? I just took another look and I hate the UI. Plus it's ssslllooowwww.”

May 28 at 1:03 am - Link

VERMOT-GAUCHY, Rich Bruchal, Eric Johnson and 41 other people liked this

FriendFeed is so much better it isn't funny. Discuss Jaiku here. I'll post more of my thoughts shortly. UPDATE: @patphelan says it's about people, not UI. I don't agree totally. Yes, if everyone were over on Jaiku I'd probably put up with the ugly UI, but there's a reason why they didn't move and we're moving to FriendFeed. - Robert Scoble

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anyone have an invite? - Wolfsbayne

I tried Jaiku for all of 5 minutes. It was just clunky as hell, really slow (like you mentioned) and there was nobody there that interested me. - Zach Flauaus

@ismaild says that Jaiku is not a Twitter competitor. I disagree. The usage model is very similar to Twitter and, for that matter, FriendFeed. Now it's not a very good competitor, that's true, but it is a competitor. - Robert Scoble

It's still closed to new registrations. I wonder if Google is working on scaling the databases or if they've simply placed it on ice for awhile? - Dusty

i think friendfeed beats out jaiku because of the spartan interface and because friendfeed is like the only web 2.0 not in freaking beta. - Tyler Gillies

Responding to @paulfabretti on Twitter. FriendFeed has far better groupings and far better search engine and far faster response time. - Robert Scoble

Dusty: I'll try to find out what Google's plans are for Jaiku tomorrow at the Google Developer Conference. - Robert Scoble

seriously and this will sound strange, its a geek hangout, I am clever than you syndrome, I know more about Nokia than you, used it at the start and love it but then a few hotshots came in and now they rule - Patphelan

Jaiku have missed the boat. Twitter and FriendFeed have blitzed the competition. - Michael McGimpsey

Jaiku is still in closed beta, nobody will use it if they can't get an invite. - Graeme Shaw

Graeme: even if they let everyone in nobody would use it. FriendFeed kicks its behind. - Robert Scoble

Pownce is awfully slow, too. Is there something fundamentally flawed about the numberless database queries that these services do? - Dusty

@all try meemi.com in the next days we release our API and Widget. For now not is possible that an user include "other feed" but this is the next feature. In the next time we share the our thread on other platform so every bloggers have a centralized platform for comment (like disq.us) ... we introduce the video and audio post so we have many type than tumblr ;) ... try we waiting feedbak :) - Enrico

Twitter v Jaiku is horses for courses. Twitter is like a cacophony of cell phone users chatting on a public bus. Jaiku is threaded truly machine-aware. Its mobile client runs snappily quick among our workgroup, showing the city name of people and their availability. But if you don't have friends on Jaiku, it probably seems boring, or even too European. As Jyri could tell you during the GDC, there are distributed nodes on the GAE that Jaiku could use to great effect. Time will tell. - Bernie Goldbach

Because it's still closed too.. - Xavier Moisant via twhirl

if it is no good, why Google bought it? - Jansen Lu

remember that twitter is txt while jaiku is the phone. combine with android. think again. - kosmar

Can you still sign up for Jaiku if you're invited? Or, is it closed to all new registrations regardless of invites? - Dusty

I love the speed of FriendFeed's comments/likes/edits... I worked with some Social aggregation companies, and they were all kind of blah... Spock looked good extracting pictures and keywords from pages, but FriendFeed grabbed my attention by extracting the feeds. Wow! Just my guess, but the FriendFeed engineers are probably way better than the Twitter guys. Good programmers and designers making sharp choices. - Mitchell Tsai

Hey Robert, it was me who prompted you to discuss this (via email). I like Jaiku, but yes it does look like Friendfeed is massively quicker. Something I hadn't considered before... - Ben Gracewood

Jaiku didn't build the community strategically, by courting/wooing the people w/ the biggest social graph. We migrate to where our friends are. Where's their community evangelist? I attend many podcamps/blog/social media events, never seen them there. Not even signage. You have to be IN community to create one. - annie heckenberger

To get the true T vs. J comparison, you need to run m.twitter.com on a cell phone against the Jaiku client on a cell phone. You need to have smart friends in both settings. Then land in a foreign place and ask your mobile client a question. If you have smart friends in both use cases, you'll have a meaningful shoot-out. If all your posse hangs out in one kingdom, you've already made your microblogging choice. - Bernie Goldbach

and you need invitation..... - Roblogger

Bernie, could you explain that node system quickly? - Fredrik Nordmoen

Who needs an invite? - Raanan Avidor

I just signed into my Jaiku account (forgot I had one) and I don't follow anybody. Why? Because it's boring. FriendFeed and Twitter have all the talk going on. - Zach Flauaus

I suppose I need to properly use it before I launch a barrage of criticisms. - Dusty

you can't check friendfeed from twitter, but you can check twitter from friendfeed - Tyler Gillies

i need invite please - Tyler Gillies

Jaiku is being remodelled to work on app engine and was showed of as part of the app engine announcements, also a UI cleanup? - Mike Scott

It's amazing how much an easy and fast sign up process will attract new users. I had a friend this evening who was only moderately interested in Twitter take the plunge because the sign up was such a snap. - Dusty

OK, two huge things missing from Friendfeed are SMS and IM integration - Ben Gracewood

I've always prefered Jaiku, I liked the extra functionality it had that Friendfeed has now implemented, but it was like being in a fun fair on your own, great for a while, but ultimately quite dull with no-one to share it with. - Stuart Grimshaw

I don't see any differenc abotu what we are doing here than we would on Jaiku. Different UI siure (although you might argue that Jaiku layout was the insipiration for Apple's threaded SMS conversations on the iPhone!). There is equal access to a wide variety of content that users bring into FF/Jaiku (blogs, feeds, flickr etc.) and can discuss each. Furthermore, Jaiku has a fantastic mobile app. FF doesn't even have a mobile site! - Paul Fabretti

People will use any platform if it works and 'feels right.' For me, Jaiku feels all wrong. - Jim Connolly

email for invite is tjgillies@gmail.com and as far as mobile integration for FF isn't there fftogo.com? - Tyler Gillies

To sum up my thoughts. Jaiku = closed, then they won't have the same amount of users as Twitter and/or FF. In the end it's the number of users who decides, I'm not going to join a social-friend-something when all my friends are using another service. - Fredrik Nordmoen

Paul: I use FF all the time from my iPhone and Nokia phones. Works just fine and I like it better than trying to load some software on my phone. - Robert Scoble

I'm in Jaiku also and while I like some of it, FriendFeed+Twitter is generally much nicer combination of tools for conversation. - Daniel Schildt

I don't know if anyone has noticed but Facebook has added several more services to their 'Import' feature on the mini-feed. It goes beyond Digg, Flickr, and Picasa now to a few more services. It's something they should have done a long time ago and they are still not utilizing all of the possible services out there. - Dusty

used to use jaiku more than twitter but jaiku was always bogging down, and didn't have a mobile friendly site [dunno if they already have 1 now], i liked that you could feed it stuff like rss from your blogs or flickr streams etc. but in the end i just fed twitter to jaiku. - Vincent B Castro

FriendFeed is so fast and you can pull in feeds from all over. It seems like such a winning model at the moment. I'm impressed at how fast my Twitter updates appear on FF as it seems like it's real time. - Dusty

@Fredrik Nordmoen On my Nokia S60 edition phones, Jaiku knows where it is located in the world. So when I walked Copenhagen, Jaiku showed me the name of the borough where it was connected to the 3G network. In Ireland, Jaiku tells people the name of the nearest city when my phone attaches itself to a nearby cell mast. When I am using my phone for some data tasks, Jaiku shows me as a green dot. When I change my phone's profile to a silent one, Jaiku shows me as a red (unavailable) dot. This is handy for me, - Bernie Goldbach

@Robert fair point, although having used Jaiku since "the early days", mobile browsing has come on somewhat! iPhone being the case in point! - Paul Fabretti

http://www.jaiku.com/blog/2008... - Mike Scott

I don't find Pownce to be slow at all and it's more functional than Jaiku. - Amit Morson

@Bernie I didn't know that about Jaiku. That's really impressive. Twitter seems so lightweight and heavily dependent upon the API developers for innovation. - Dusty

It should really be Jaiku v. Friendfeed, not Jaiku v. Twitter. - Rubin Sfadj

The size and speed of this discussion thread has just made me a convert from Jaiku to Friendfeed. Seriously. - Ben Gracewood

anyone have any invites for jaiku? :) - Tyler Gillies

@Rubin. I think you have something there, although let me throw this in from October last year http://blendingthemix.com/2007... - Paul Fabretti

need jaiku invite? go here to grab: http://kosmar.de/archives/2008... - kosmar

@Ben I agree. It's converting me as well. I had signed up for FF and Social Thing awhile back but had neglected them. - Dusty

Let's start a mass migration over to Pownce (just to check if they go down too on mass usage) - Tapio Liller

@Bernie Goldbach, that was actually pretty nice. But I misread your previous post and thought there were no friends in Jaiku, but dependent on your location... - Fredrik Nordmoen

i have an account on jaiku, but never found it useful because no one i know uses it. so i am still not too familiar with it. when i'm honest, i don't like the UI of friendfeed. i know I'm biased since i work on lifestream.fm, but at the moment, i do believe that none of these lifestreaming services are optimal. we are working to make lifestream what the users want. i have a nice list of what users want, but in the end, i still think most want something clean, simple, useful, and will ultimately use what.. - Jodi Church-Wagner

friendfeed is the new jaiku now it has channels/rooms - Adrian

..their contacts will use. i don't really think in terms of twitter vs. friendfeed or jaiku vs friendfeed. i prefer to use twitter to communicate. and services like freindfeed are aggregation tools to me with the potential to be more like twitter and beyond. - Jodi Church-Wagner

@kosmar, thnx for the invite - Tyler Gillies

pownce is really great for sharing and community. lately it has technical problems as well. but i am beginning to think the entire web is broken. it seems all sites i like to use are having technical problems. - Jodi Church-Wagner

@jodi - agreed. Jaiku=better, but "no" users, Twitter=no features, no realiability, but 1 million users! @Adrian agreed. Could spell the end for Jaiku, although I think Google did that! Methinks they only have it for the mobile client to be used in Adroid! - Paul Fabretti

Ditto bernie on the phone integration stuff. Jaiku Nokia integration is absolutely incredible and has to be used to be believed. If someone (hellloooo Friendfeed) can do something similar with the iPhone SDK, it will be a killer app. - Ben Gracewood

i have 20 invites to jaiku if anyone really wants to try it out - Jodi Church-Wagner

Jaiku includes a lot of stuff that neither Twitter nor FriendFeed have, principally around mobile phone. Try using it on a Nokia S60, with the client, and you get location awareness - something that's going to be enormous over the next few years. However, I'm sad to say (because I love Jaiku) that I don't think Google will make much of it: according to rumour, apart from its port to Google AppEngine, it's now maintained as a "20% time" project. However, "Jaiku 2.0" may appear, as a feature of Android. - Ian Betteridge

i just want to use jaiku so i have something else to feed friendfeed. - Tyler Gillies

Jaiku may not have been quick enough in building the communities that Twitter and and FF have, but as I've said before what happens if it ships as the default Android address book - http://www.jonathanmulholland.... ? Would Google Jaiku care about failing to capture the early adopter crowd if they take lifestreaming mass market via Jaiku-Android integration? - Jon Mulholland

Not a fair comparison, Robert. Jaiku has lain fallow since Google bought them. No improvements since then, closed to invite only. It's essentially a dead service. A year ago, when I left Twitter for Jaiku, Jaiku was way ahead. Since then, Twitter has gone nowhere, Jaiku was sold, and Pownce and FF have arisen, and I'm back on Twitter, arguably the least well designed and certainly the least reliable, but ultimately that's where the community is and that's all that matters. - Leo Laporte

@Leo, welcome to the discussion - Tyler Gillies

Leo, check out the response to Robert's comment though. I'd argue that the community is rapidly heading to Friendfeed. I always loved Jaiku's discussion threads attached to each post. Friendfeed has this, and is an order of magnitude faster than Jaiku. - Ben Gracewood

I don't think FF is quite right, either. It's too scattered to feel like a community. A post like this becomes a discussion, but then it's lost in a tsunami of other content. There's way too much going on on FF to feel like a community. That's part of why Twitter works: it's all there in that timeline. (For better or worse). For example, to find this post to comment again I had to go to Twitter. You're promoting it on Twitter. Why? Because that's the best way to find it! What's FF minus Twitter? - Leo Laporte

It's all about the community and the ease of service. Those are key. Twitter's features aren't heavily promoted or easy to understand when you're a new user. It took me several weeks before I discovered the track feature via IM. Truly, it's amazing that Twitter is still growing. It seems that the 'Twitter is down' image with the whale being carried by birds is becoming more of a running joke than something for us to get angry about anymore. We don't have ads (unless you're in Japan). - Dusty

google did a nice job of buying a couch cushion here. i hope that changes with android. - MG Siegler

@Leo, I like the flash mob style of gathering for discussion and then disappearing into the "tsunami of content" it breaks the mold. its new and exciting - Tyler Gillies

In a way Twitter encompasses everything that is strange and unreasonable about the new 'web 2.0' explosion. It hasn't established a solid ad model (unless in you're in Japan), continues to have VC money tossed at it, cannot scale properly,and continues to offer everything for free and asking nothing of its users in return. - Dusty

Microsoft has shown that they are not afraid to pull out their pocketbook and spend some dough acquiring services. Do you think they may have their sights set on Twitter just for the eyeballs? - Dusty

@Leo You gotta be where the people are at. - Michael McGimpsey

Using this FF comments page reminds me of the old HTML chat days where you had to constantly refresh to see new message. - Dusty

@MG Siegler - agreed! - Jon Mulholland

@Dusty If Microsoft got their hands on Twitter then that would be a reason to go to Jaiku - Michael McGimpsey

I totally agree with Leo. Jaiku was seen as a Twitter competitor at first, and lost b/c people like to think that "less is more"; then it was bought out and frozen by Google. Now Friendfeed does the exact same thing, and it's hugely popular not b/c of its UI. It's b/c it's seen as a companion, not a competitor to Twitter. Jaiku never got that chance (or never tried to surf that wave). - Rubin Sfadj

It can't be considered competition to Twitter unless it has SMS. Right now I believe Jaiku is the only one that fits that criteria. SMS is what makes Twitter in many ways - being able to update anywhere. - Jesse Stay

twitter and tumbler are simple and scalable visually. FF is useful, but visually fuzzy. ff seems more akin to email than twitter. twitter's forced limit is just right. requires focus. narrows scope. - terra210

honestly i didn't really start using twitter until i started using friendfeed - Tyler Gillies

i also agree with Leo about FF being too scattered to feel like a community. i think the community (or communities) are still mostly on the services that re being fed into friendfeed. this is not a bad thing at all. but the ability to have some discussion on here is a great option. - Jodi Church-Wagner

Wow Friendfeed needs to do some UI work on long comment threads. Scrolling up and down to enter comments is lame. - Ben Gracewood

Competitors or not both are community services. And the key of a community service is the community. UI responsiveness is important, but to a lesser extent. Take the example of MySpace, slow, ugly UI, but it has/had success. If Friendfeed were simply cool & quick, but nobody replied to your messages, would you still post here Scoble? - funkyboy

Whats wrong with the UI Robert? Its a decent UI. And your initial argument over a year ago was that Jaiku was too complicated and you prefered the simplicity of Twitter. What has changed for you to now love FriendFeed? Because it is doing *nothing* new and a whole lot less than Jaiku did. Channels? Yep. Hiding feeds? Yep. Threaded conversations? Yep. And then there was the killer S60 integration. But alas, the service is dead now. Look for the reincarnation in Android. - Jamie

if interface in future is multi-touch, visual strengh/simplicity will define meaning. i still would like audio added to twitter....just so you could turn on the mulitple streams. edit twit symphony... - terra210

"although you might argue that Jaiku layout was the insipiration for Apple's threaded SMS conversations on the iPhone!" - I think you will find iChat (2003) was the inspiration for the SMS UI on the iPhone. - Jamie

@Jamie and regarding UI: how do you like the awesome Friendfeed UI? Scroll to the top of this page to hit "comment". LOL - Ben Gracewood

@nzben I get the comment link just below the original post. Not ideal from a UI POV, but not terrible - James Marwood

Does it stay up though? Can u tell I am twit-jaded? - /(bb|[^b]{2})/ (Kamath) via twhirl

I need an invite for jaiku. My email address is codesurgeon AT gmail DOT com - Mustafa K. Isik

i think the problem is that friendfeed didn't think that this many people would comment on a single 2 line message - Tyler Gillies

the third screen is the battlefield. - kosmar

Have 20 invites for Jaiku if anybody is interested - I only use Jaiku for my Danish followers - Otherwise I only use FF or Twitter. - Christian Bogh

Let's wait until the guys at Google release a new version and see how it will integrate with other Google services - João Almeida via twhirl

I think Jaiku will be integrated in Google Reader soon. - Svartling

I'd love a Jaiku invite if anybody has one. - David Owens

To everyone Looking for a Jaiku Invite go visit http://JaikuInvites.com - Ciaran Rooney

Jaiku in GReader seems a pretty neat idea - João Almeida via twhirl

I don't like all the feeds that I have to manually unsubscribe to one-by-one on Jaiku. It's all a bit to much in one place. - Jamie Clark

Jaiku is simply not open to the public - if they don´t open up soon, they will loose the race anyway! - Dieter Schwarz via twhirl

I prefer the interface of Jaiku to Twitter. The problem is that Jaiku has no audience. Jaiku is like a nice looking bar that none of my friends patronize. It still looks like a nice place, but not much fun happens there. - Phil Yanov

I think the reason is... SXSW. Hype. The fact that it has become the verb for the microblogging movement. I'm trying to get a jaiku invite, maybe it not being open yet has something to do with it. - Evan Travers

@Phil, good analogy - Tyler Gillies

Maybe it's a European dimension but I can update both Jaiku and Twitter via SMS. I get my Jaiku flow through text updates, something Twitter cannot provide so I'm stuck missing conversations during episodes of missing histories. Like an absent-minded bar maid, Twitter is there when I saunter by. But in the meantime, I've got dozens of friends, real and virtual, on Jaiku who converse in a threaded way. That's helpful for me, but I can see where some people want the craic of the A-List noise on Twitter. - Bernie Goldbach

Jaiku isn't a Twitter competitor. Twitter strives to be a microblog *only*. Jaiku wants to be much more than that - and, frankly, doesn't deliver. It doesn't like the feed of one of my blogs (and f-yeah, using Feedburner!), the comment system is not as developed as FriendFeed...Pownce IMHO is a better microblogging-plus-some-lifestreaming solution... but hey Bret and Paul, add some microblogging features to FriendFeed! - Cesar Cardoso

I prefer Jaiku to Twitter in every way but one. The people I want to follow are on Twitter. So there you go. - CJ Kloote

I you want to beat the friendly UI with the sickly back end... you can't have a sickly UI AND a sickly back end. - Nancy Babyak

Pounce is interesting but seems to attract a much younger crowd then twitter. It does have an import friend feature, first 100, and while everyone I followed on twitter was there, only about 5% had actually posted. Pounce does show your age by default. I felt old, but then found the area to hide your profile. I still like twitter the best. Twitter makes me feel more comfortable for some reason. - Maxine Appleby via Alert Thingy

FF has some serious work to do re: commenting. It's functionally broken with this many comments. Essentially it's the Fun Wall on Facebook. - Rick Powell

Since Jaiku is closed to invites and FriendFeed is open and still has only a % of the users of Twitter, it seems that the answer is obvious as most say. It isn't about technology but people. I'd rather meet all my friends at a dive than try to look cool at a members only club most days. I'd agree with Leo that Twitter/Friendfeed together makes the most sense. - Jay Gilmore

I've been waiting for an invite for months, that might have something to do with it. - Cyndy

someone above mentioned it already but with so many comments, it's worth repeating - for jaiku invites, see http://JaikuInvites.com. I got my invite within an hour of my request. - acedanger

jaiku reminds me of a basterdized version of twitter and friendfeed - Greg North

I have a few invites. Add me to your Friendfeed (I'll add you in return) and let me know how to get that invite to you. - Mike Lewis

Just to remind everyone the Jaiku was around BEFORE twitter and long before friendfeed, It has the best feature set and the best mobile access. Twitter and FriendFeed are all about the people A-listers like Scoble. Jaiku is about real community not noise. - Ciaran Rooney

@scoble : I don't find it that slow or ugly, maybe a little bit confusing and not as simple as twitter but it does the job - directeur

In my experience, Jaiku has not been slow. I use its mobile interface when I'm outside if Twitter is down. - Morton Fox

@acedanger: Thanks for posting that link. Was wondering when someone was going to do it (I was about to!). :) - Cheryl Jones

Jaiku is a bit harder to get into as far as finding interesting conversations, which is bad for the typical impatient Net users (many of which I've seen in this thread). But it rewards patient users who find interesting people to follow. I feel like the presence of conversation threads makes interaction a lot more fulfilling. This is also why FriendFeed is good, because of threaded conversations. - Cheryl Jones

Also there are so many spammer! - SteJules via twhirl

Who needs Jaiku when you have FriendFeed? - Thomas Hawk

Jaiku may be slow, but not as slow as Pownce! - Mack D. Male

Jaiku's problem is that it's most powerful feature is limited to Nokia phones. Everyone doesn't have a Nokia, therefore it gets missed. I've also said that Jaiku's implementation of comments is not as seamless as FriendFeed's. It requires an extra page load/extra step, where it's MUCH easier to join the conversation in FriendFeed. And finally, the community. Jaiku's community is not is vibrant as Twitter or FriendFeed. That is the biggest issue in my opinion. - Bwana McCall

Personally I really like Jaiku - albeit it's similar to Friendfeed. I like the fact that Google is running it - so i expect support would be far better than FF or Twitter. It has sms which is lacking FF (and twitter doesn't work on my current phone, support is non-existant). I also like their rooms better since they have a better directory listing and it's more reminiscent of the irc for me. The thing that's lacking is the community, btw i'm pbrush on jaiku. - Doug Brooks

none of my friends are on Twitter, Jaiku, FF, so for me the all suck as social networks. I use Twitter for status sync with Pulse (my business contacts are on there) and Hyves (my friends are there). Jaiku Pownce Numpa (dutch) aren't interesting to me. I use FF to subscribe to people like Robert and use it as a sort of Feed reader, but instead for blogs it's for people... - Mark Jenniskens

What this conversation needs is a greasemonkey script that does a few search and replace manoeuvres: .replace('Twitter', 'Ford').replace('Jaiku', 'Chevy').replace('Google', 'GM').replace('FF', 'Ford Fiesta'); - Micah Wittman

If you don't like the look - just change it ;) I've just started work on a stylish extension for it and it's easy to strip out the bits you don't like. Besides, I'm more often interfacing with it through google talk, so then it's just a message. - Alex Leonard

Oh, and the other thing I wanted to mention is that I've connected with an excellent community of web developers on Jaiku and often find it an excellent place to post questions to with excellent results. - Alex Leonard

Is there a client like twhirl for jaiku? - blacktulip via twhirl

For those of you who dumped your Twitter and blog feeds into Jaiku and don't actually post there, you're missing the point. RSS feed dumping don't equal interaction. Once you get into conversations with people (as with FF), that's when you'll see Jaiku shine. - Cheryl Jones

Jaiku has better taste with Jaikungfu http://jonas.lemonad.org/arkiv... - silpol

@Cheryl: Exactly. If you don't participate, you can not possibly evaluate. - Andy C

I think that the fact it's invitations only killed it. Even Google can't help them in this stage. It should have been integrated to some of their applications long time ago. - Orli Yakuel

Jaiku is by far a superior service than Twitter, truly conversational messaging, great group discussion (before FF) ,deep mobile integration, reliable (most of the time) and is build on a good architecture design. The main problem of Jaiku is now Google and the number of users currently using the service. - israel

I used Jaiku before Google bought it and it was quite boring, No one to follow or post to, and no apps as FriendFeed and Twitter have amassed. - Randy

If Google doesn't open it, it will never be a *real* competitor to Twitter! I think if Pownce adds phone alerts, it could take Twitter down! - Josué Almeida

IMO the true story of Jaiku stays untold... my impression that it had been done "on purpose", i.e. relatively cheap data collection of big size covered as interaction social service, to be sold later to GOOG :) mission accomplished, now on freeze/invitations-only :) - silpol

i think the UI of jaiku is kinda sexy - Tyler Gillies

jaiku needs more features ;-) - Google Reader

@z3ux I seem to get a lot of spamvites from Pownce, which is kinda sad - Wil

Jaiku was experiencing some load issues couple of hours ago... which is quite unusual for a Google service. - Wil

@leolaporte I am genuinely interested. search may be an issue sometime, but Twitter seems pretty scattered as well doesn't it? - ChangeForge | Ken Stewart

Hey guys, Jaiku noticed this convo and blogged about it: http://www.jaiku.com/blog/2008... - Voyagerfan5761

Even Kevin Rose (founded pownce) uses twitter a lot, he says fundamental difference is that twitter is for communication, pownce is for sharing media...that is the difference in his mind. Idea: what if twitter merged with friendfeed and migrated over twitters to a stable, reliable ff w/ sms!!! - Pokai

I was just forwarded a Jaiku invite yesterday and have been playing with it. To evaluate Jaiku, you need to analyze (1) the application (2) the third party offerings, and (3) the robustness of the community. So far I'm actually impressed with (1). As FriendFeed users will testify, conversations organized around an item are nice. - Ontario Emperor

My further comments: http://www.lastpodcast.net/200... - Ontario Emperor

i like the jaiku UI - Tyler Gillies

Any reason why a proven IM systems couldn't just add opt-in microblogging and commenting features? Seems like iChat, Jabber, AIM, etc. would bring more users into a Twitter-like world than Twitter can scale to an IM world. - Kawika Holbrook

wow! lots of opinions. Jaiku is dead because it's closed. It never was bigger than Twitter because alot of the a-listers (like it or not) did not use it as a primary communication channel except Leo Laporte. Jaiku is more a direct competitor of Friendfeed (both are lifestreams). Also I hated the tools to post on Jaiku. Twitteriffic was way better. Jaiku's wworst enemy is Google. Why do they shut things off when they buy them. IT IS PLAIN F*#%ing stupid. when will they learn? - DC Crowley

@DC Crowley. So what would you do after acquiring a company? Would you ask the team to deal with the rapid increase in usage (caused by the publicity around the acquisition) whilst also trying to integrate into a new company/technology platform? Or would you just leave everything the same and end up with dozens of little groups using radically different technologies? I also find it interesting and somewhat sad that you think the micro-celebs of the blogging world are the only people who matter. - Adewale Oshineye

twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, friendfeed..........information overload...... - Thomas Chai

Jason Kaneshiro posted an entry on Webomatica - Technology and Entertainment Digest

I’m Boycotting Twitter Until They Get Their Act Together

May 15 at 2:49 pm - Link

Roger Chen, Louis Gray, edythe and 9 other people liked this

I'm not moving that far yet, but if FriendFeed had a full function mobile client (MojiPage only has partial functionality), I'd seriously consider it. - Ontario Emperor

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I can handle it. The cravings should subside in a few hours :) - Jason Kaneshiro

Jason - you're funny - it is a FREE service - Maxine Appleby

How does boycotting a free service really hurt anyone but yourself? - Dana Franks via twhirl

no one is trying to hurt twitter with the Twit-Out boycott...just send a very loud and clear message to them to fix their IT environment issue. - Susan Beebe

Maxine, I guess in this case I'm getting what I paid for: nothing. And I'd be even more pissed if I had paid for it. - Jason Kaneshiro

Dana I'm hurting myself? How so? relying on an unreliable service is even more harmful. Whether it's free or not is beside the point. And if I replace Twitter with FriendFeed, I haven't lost much. - Jason Kaneshiro

If you've got a viable alternative, then it wouldn't matter. But if most of your social network is on Twitter and will stay on Twitter, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. - Dana Franks via twhirl

Good point. Lucky for me, most of the users I interact with on Twitter are on FriendFeed too, or read my blog. So no nose cutting here. - Jason Kaneshiro

In my case, my FriendFeed network is about half the size of my Twitter network. But, like superdelegates migrating to Obama, Twitter users are establishing FriendFeed accounts - Michael Hanscom (@djwudi) just set up a FriendFeed account, for example. I'm still waiting to hear from Jaiku... - Ontario Emperor

I wish there were a temporary FriendFeed mechanism to block all things referencing twitter outages... - Robert Seidman

Two weeks later: FriendFeed has first two-hour outage following mass exodus from Twitter... - laurence timms

I'm not ready to go that far but every time twitter goes down it's hard not to think that more people will simply switch over to friendfeed. That said friendfeed did go down recently but it was brief and the only time I've experienced an interruption in the service - Eric Berlin

Jason, that's a good point -- depending on a undependable service doesn't really make sense. Just because it's free doesn't mean we should put up with crappy service. Would you have the same 'don't complain' attitude to crappy uptime from Google Reader? Gmail? Youtube? Seesmic? Your favourite blog? - Shey

Robert Scoble posted a message

“yes Twitter is down. Now is a good time to work! No noise on FriendFeed! Heh.”

May 15 at 1:51 pm - Link

duckamuk, ravi karandeekar, accesine and 21 other people liked this

Joke's on us. With all the talk of a Twitter boycott, Twitter decided to preemptively boycott us. - Mark Logan

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Robert, any insight why Twitter is down a lot more often these days? - Rudy Amid

Wait - I thought it was the opposite! Once Twitter is down, that's when FriendFeed gets noisy! ;) - Nathaniel Payne

Rudy - see this: http://blog.compete.com/2008/0... - Christopher Dickens

did it occur to anyone that maybe the FF guys are sabotaging Twitter to grab their users? :-) - Dave Hodson

Is anyone tracking Twitter downtime? Seems to happen several times a day now. - Mark Logan

It's like a shark keeps stalking your favorite beach. Will someone please shoot the shark? - Jeff Crites

This is getting ridiculous. How can you advocate its use for business when you can't depend on it to stay up? - Dana Franks via twhirl

No noise? what do you call me? :) - Fred Grott

lol@Mark - Shey

Twit-Out anyone? http://friendfeed.com/e/433390... - Shey

lol, Twit-out! Twit-out! - Bwana McCall

I'm not sure that boycotting a free service would accomplish much. - Dana Franks via twhirl

I want to participate in that event, blogged it a few minutes ago. tired of twitter's appaling level of service. - Richard Azia via Alert Thingy

Dana, at my blog you can see a bunch of the conversation we've all been having about Twit-Out http://jerseysuburbia.com Some might disagree, but a bunch of us think it's worth a try. - Andrew Dobrow

is Twhirl down too? Ah well, time for me to return to reality *shudders* - Iain Baker

I bet it does. Matter of fact, we've already got a great discussion going surrounding it. A boycott doesn't always have to "make change", it can simply spark several discussions around the topic. http://friendfeed.com/e/6a155c... My goal is to learn from the twit-out, and share that knowledge with everyone who cares. - Bwana McCall

OMG - I have hives - I am going through twitter withdrawls - Maxine Appleby

I am so badly addicted to twitter I cannot stop checking it ... need twitter now ... - Robert B. Morshe

Oh look my Twit-Out followers are back! Friendfeed for FTW! (poor twitter bird fell out of the tree again -ouch!) - Susan Beebe

Jeff, I wish there would be a Captain Quint scene (played by Robert Shaw) in which he shows up and promises to scale Twitter for the outrageous sum of $10,000. "For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing." - Karim

thank god for FF though! - Sarah Perez

I think this is the first time I've blinked today... glad Twhirl has FriendFeed support - Josh via twhirl

@Karim - and Cap'n Quint is joined by Cap'n Kirk (Scotty. I need. Twitter. Now!) and Cap'n Crunch ... who's just on hand to offer sugary goodness to take the edge off this whole damn thing. - Jeff Crites

haha... I actually started reading a book in the interim... how spoilet we are to Twitter - Gilbert Corrales

There is no news and free debate without noise, Robert, don't block. - Prokofy Neva

Yeah, FF rocks... but not from my phone! Where's mobile for FriendFeed? - Mark Arend

Somehow, I still like twitter... - Lakshman Prasad via twhirl

This post is going on 48 hrs. - Russellreno

e w/mark where's my phone-friendly friendfeed? - Morgan via twhirl

Get an iPhone. - Robert Scoble

Tip: Now you can add FriendFeed to your blog with our new customizable FriendFeed widgets!