Twitter Moving Towards Jaiku?
The latest storm from the world of Nordic microblogging got me thinking a lot about Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, the microblogging in general and the Open Stack that's trying to open up the silos, not just in microblogging, but the social web in large. We are looking into reaching the point where, just as Jyri Engeström put it, "[n]o single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform"
Now Many have realized that Twitter, which was competing head on with Jaiku and has won that race for now, should allow the service to develop towards what Jaiku did right when it launched, namely enable conversations. I believe those two services are different and perhaps should remain so and just talk to each other via open standards such as XMPP or an XMPP equivalent. Therefore I am not advocating Twitter becoming more Jaiku-like. Twitter should have its own future trajectory. What I am very strongly advocating is for the heavy users of FriendFeed and Twitter to start using Jaiku, the one service that does what services and apps using Twitter API are increasingly trying to do. TweeTree being the most recent example of that. Do I have a vested intrested in this? You can bet on it! I strongly believe Jaiku is a better service to engage in meaningful conversations and I am in Jaiku, but many people I would like to converse with are not.
Below Chris Messina below outlines his vision on where he sees activity streams going. He notes that activity streams need a "[l]ocation and context attached to or as attributes of social objects that are being created" and not just a lonely tweet which is not connected to anything. As Chris mentions in the video below [8min 27 sec into it], this is where Jaiku started from. Now we just need to get Google to realize the value it has in Jaiku and let Jyri & Co. to develop Jaiku further by incorporating filtering (by actor, action, social object, place, time, etc.), fast feed fetching, opening it up for the world to use and develop and voilá. Compare this to the #hashtags, which is about the only thing you can use to put your Tweet into a relevant context. This is really nothing but a poor hack compared to what Jaiku already can do for the conversations.
Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.
Since we are not yet living in a world where all the silos are broken and all the services can talk to each other, I think the Silicon Valley digerati should pull their heads from the California sand, see beyond their Valley bubble and give (yet again) Jaiku collectively a try to realize its value instead of complaining how the Twitter-cum-Jaiku attempts don't work. Yes it's closed, but the invitations are unlimited and I'm sure most of the microblogging heavy users already have an account. If not, I will personally send an invitation to anyone asking for one (you can email me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com). Twitter has the critical mass, but Jaiku still kicks its ass any day as a service to have meaningful conversations in. Since Twitter is not going to become Jaiku any time soon we all should give Jaiku another try. Struggling with two services is a drag, but things are changing fast, and once the users are there, Jaiku and Twitter can complement each other until the two services can openly talk to each other - or until a better option emerges.
Jaiku needs its critical mass and it needs to grow to become truly relevant to link people globally. I am advocating people to move there not only because I or some other people are there, but for the purposes of having conversations, it is a far better service than Twitter or FriendFeed. We should see and use the two services as the different services that they are, just as Eat.fi's founder @Spongefile commented here:
Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.
So how about it Scoble? While we wait for the silos to come down, shall I send you a Jaiku invite?
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I don't understand this fight against Twitter. Jaiku is a way to chat with people. Like for instance IRC (yes that text based).
Difference here is that Twitter is not a chat. So basically in that context, it is totally different way to communicate. Saying that it is "no way to communicate" is wrong.
It sounds me that Jaiku is walking its last mile and small but loud fan base is trying to struggle against inevitable. However, fighting against Twitter is not the way guys.
http://www.twitip.com/why-twitter-will-go-mainstream-in-2009/
A while back I tried to figure out why Twitter Won the Race (http://zipitheory.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-did-twitter-win-race.html), but I might have missed one crucial element: commitment. Compare to Twitter, Jaiku's superior discussion abilities generate a feeling that one should be actively responding. And it is wonderful how responsive Jaiku users are; however, many 'normal' people don't have the time to be constantly on top of a service like Jaiku. So if you miss a great comment that was left a day or two ago, you start 'to feel a bit bad' that you did not react more quickly. Whereas with Twitter, it gives the feeling that it's fine to simply post status messages with no or very low levels of engagement. This lead to me thinking that commitment expectations should be considered carefully during web service design.
However, at the end of the day, to me it is mainly about where the majority of the following types of people hang out: those that you meet/have met in real life, those that you 'might' meet in real life, those that add value to your life, and those that can influence your life. And, for now, for me, that's Jaiku and Facebook. But the reality is that – most of the time – I Moodblast and wait for email notifications. It's not perfect, but with a wife and kid at home, it works pretty well.
@pete,
It's not a fight against Twitter. I use Twitter along with my Jaiku and vise versa. People just tend to see them as full on competitors, not least because they were launched almost at the same time and were the first microblogging services of their kind in the market.
More than competition, it's about people trying to innovate with Twitter API, where there is a full blown service that can do it all. That's Jaiku. A service that with some work could grow into mainstream alongside with Twitter. And for Jaiku it's critical to get the same mass working for it that is working for Twitter at the moment.
Richard,
You might be onto something there, but remember that the same 'should be actively responding' and ‘to feel a bit bad’ feelings are many times also the very reasons we come back to different services. Thus, these feelings also create stickiness.
I fully agree with you on your second point. In the long run, it's all about the network effect and where your people are.
Good post Ville. It's needed to point out how the two services differ and what their core essentials are. I totally agree both with Richard and you about the stickiness factor of Jaiku. I experienced the exact same feelings Richard describes during the Christmas break. Like @spongefile says, Jaiku is an ongoing cocktail party one doesn't want to miss, whereas Twitter primarly is a social search engine and a news flash service not to be missed. To use the comparison new vs old media I would say Jaiku is the true social new media that makes people talk, whereas Twitter still has more the function of the old media megafon, now only used by individuals.
I'm truly hopeful that this year brings us closer to two of my wishes:
- To be able to easily save and find all the conversations oneself has taken part of, i.e microblogs, article and blog comments etc. So much information left behind.
- To be able to follow and make conversations in one's network without the excess of duplicate information due to usage of multiple services.
While the idea of foreign friends, that Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström talk about, gives great comfort to those matters, I'll also be more than happy to share my Jaiku invites with those who enjoy cocktail parties and conversations (paula.marttila [at] gmail.com)
Thanks Paula! I believe that 2009 will bring us much closer to solving what you aptly described here as:
"- To be able to easily save and find all the conversations oneself has taken part of, i.e microblogs, article and blog comments etc. So much information left behind.
- To be able to follow and make conversations in one’s network without the excess of duplicate information due to usage of multiple services."
Well put!