I think many Twitter users may know that Jaiku is a good imitation of Twitter. Some of you may know that Google has acquired Jaiku and move it to Google App Engine. Today (According to SGT), Google released the source code of Jaiku, so that more people may know it.
It seems strange because the folks at Google have not promoted Jaiku in any way yet, some people may think that Google has forgotten this platform. Of course not, look at Jaiku’s Timeline you may know that they are always improving. Google has said that Twitter is poor people’s MailList System, but what about Jaiku? Let’s discover it together.
When I enter the homepage of Jaiku, I found out that it is quite different from Twitter, it is a little complex. There is a Public Timeline on the homepage and also some featured channels and members. If you start to register for an account, you can know that there are not so many people registered, as a lot of good usernames are available. I’ve registered a “pathway”, my nickname, but my Twitter username is “Pathway8”.
Besides this, after logging in to your Jaiku, you will find that Jaiku uses L2 domain instead of subdirectory, the L2 domain looks like this: “http://pathway.jaiku.com” instead of “http://twitter.com/pathway8“. Google always wants to be different, so this simple thing can be ignored.
In your Overview page, the timeline is very similar to Twitter. Jaiku has added a default contact “Jaiku” and posted a “%Someone% joined Jaiku!” Jaiku, so that you won’t feel so boring looking at the blank page. Also, you can find that there is no statistics of contacts and followers, extremly different from Twitter.
You may realized that Jaiku users will not follow a lot, and this is the biggest difference. In Jaiku, your contacts much be someone that you really want to discover, and not just support him/her. Also, you wait what you really have to write, and not for your followers. Followers are not important at all, it’s your conversation. Also, there is a comment function, so that everyone can write other opinions.
I think Twitter and Jaiku are becoming different now, because they are for two types of users. Twitter can let a lot of people know you and can help you to promote your blog posts or other stuff. But Jaiku lets you to communicate with others with conversations. If you say that Twitter is a real-time Personal Events and Public News sharing platform, then Jaiku is a real Micro-blogging Platform. As everything is very like real blog, let me tell you why Jaiku is like blog:
First of all, not many people will subscribe your Jaikus as compare to Twitter. People will only accept interesting things, like subscribe RSS feeds. People can post comments, it is the same as blog, but Twitter can only reply, and replies are tweets too. Jaiku do not provide search engine at the moment, because people prefer Jaiku to Twitter do not need search function, they want to discover themselves.
In conclusion, I think Jaiku is a real Micro-blogging Platform, it is a shorter form of a blog. After discovering it, I found that Jaiku is not as complex as what I’ve imagined. It is also dead simple, and of course, social. For me, I think I prefer Jaiku more, because I just want to send my statuses to people that are interested in mine, and also, let them talk to me.
Which do you prefer, Jaiku or Twitter? Please leave your comments below.