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Friday 18 May, 2007

Twitter v/s Jaiku .. A Review

Oh well...categorically speaking ... this post shouldn't be here ..but what the heck.I'm impressed by the whole "social" blogging phenomenon thats sweeping the globe like wildfire ..so I decided to give these two hot contenders a try and post my opinions about them. The only reason i'm clubbing them under the mobile category is because they both have apps / ways by which you can access them via your mobile.

Twitter was one of the first in the social blogging scene and is still the favourite in some terms .Clean interface , very good API's , and of course ..a recently launched mobile version where you can access twitter from m.twitter.com from your cellphone.

Another great feature that twitter has is the ability to update your status from your phone via sms , and also from any instant messenger like gtalk . You also get your own personal page at http://www.twitter.com/yourname ..which you can share with your friends so they can know what you've been upto. If you have a GPS bluetooth device or a symbian phone like the N95 with a internal GPS , or any phone that supports Java Location API (JSR-179), then head over to www.twibble.de and install twibble. This app gets the current location coordinates and uploads it to your twitter account using GPRS , so that users using twittermaps.com can see where on the map you are right now. This is Real time location cum social blogging at its best . :D


Jaiku on the other hand has a web 2.0 look and feel to it. The whole interface is clean and tangy and really refreshing. As with twitter , jaiku also allows you to update your status and see what your friends are doing via your mobile , or sms.It goes one step further here and lets you download a sis file for symbian os smart phones and supports both symbian os 2nd and 3rd edition smart phones. Although the Jaiku app is still a beta version , it offers a lot of functionality which makes updating and viewing jaikus' from your smart phone a breeze.and believe me ... jaikuing from your cellphone is very very addictive :D !!The mobile app also lets you share your phones calendar and events as jaikus.. and you can even use bluetooth to scan for nearby jaiku'ers. How cool is that ?? Jaiku also gives you your own personal page at http://username.jaiku.com .



The most interesting feature about Jaiku that makes it (in my opinion) better than twitter is the fact that you can embed any rss , atom , swf , feed into your jaiku stream. They will show up as jaikus as and when the feeds are updated. this is really cool as i can integrate all my flickr , vox , blog , and even twitter accounts into one jaiku stream . In short ..it sort of doubles up as an RSS aggregator too letting people who visit your jaiku page know when you have updated any of the various online services or sites that you use. Another cool feature is the integration of channels in jaiku which makes it easy for you to subscribe to channels that interest you.This is somewhat similar to the IRC concept , where you can join a room and subscribe to the updates or interact on that channel.

Even though Twitter is the one site that should be given the most credit for making the whole social blogging scene come alive , it seems to have forgotten to innovate and add new features , and thats where jaiku marching ahead.Although twitters api's have been used for very innovative services such as www.twittermaps.com..which uses the co-ordinates provied by the twibble app to place you an a map , and www.twittervision.com ..which uses flickrs api and the geotags in the photos to display where those photos were clicked on a map as and when they are uploaded.But in spite of these two innovative features , what most people want today is convergence , and not another site that adds to the bookmark list , and in this respect jaiku is clearly doing a good job at it.

..And for those who want to integrate both these services ... You can try www.twitku.com , which uses jaikus api to post your twitters to your jaiku account. (although ...this can also be done from within jaiku itself). Go ahead and try out both these services and let me know what are your opinions about both of them. Any suggestions or comments are highly welcome :D

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