2007 seems to have been the year of microblogging with Twitter, Jaiku, Pounce and others. Within a few months of their appearance these services have become hugely popular for a variety of uses. While most people use it to communicate with their friends I was intrigued with the possibility to easily include thoughts, ideas and the latest infos on my blog. So I registered to both Jaiku and Twitter to see how that could be done.
As you can see on the left side of this blog page I decided on using Jaiku for this purpose in the end. The reason was simple: The flash based plugin for my blog integrates nicely into the design and has nice graphical effects. The Twitter plugin on the other hand looks a bit colorless to me, pretty static and there are reports that it blocks the page from loading when the Twitter server is down or heavily loaded.
Posting a new note is super simple. A click to the Jaiku bookmark in my browser, typing in the message and a few seconds later it is on my blog. Very nice!
Quite quickly I also started to link to friends in both Jaiku and Twitter and it’s quite interesting of keeping up to date what they are doing this way. Again I prefer Jaiku as it allows to start conversations on a topic which Twitter doesn’t do. Maybe that’s just the reason why some prefer Twitter, just statements, no conversation (at least in theory).
Are you on Jaiku or Twitter? If you like to connect my alias on both is ‘mobilesociety’.