Michael Koby

Last week, Robert Scoble asked the question of “Why is Jaiku not discussed as a competitor to Twitter” over on FriendFeed.  This started an rather large discussion about why FriendFeed is better than Jaiku.

Lets start with the basics, because many people might now know what Jaiku is.  Jaiku is a combination microblog and life streaming service that was purchased by Google and is currently invite only.  The thing is, Jaiku’s lifestreaming feature was similar to FriendFeed but was around before FriendFeed.  I will say that FriendFeed definitely implemented the lifestreaming idea better than Jaiku.

So to answer Mr. Scoble’s question, the reason that Jaiku is not discussed as a Twitter competitor is primarily due to its invite only status.  About 6 months ago, when I first got into the micro-blogging, I used Jaiku exclusively and they had their own set of downtime issues.  However, these might get resolved with Jaiku moving the Google App Engine.  However, the larger issue is that people can’t really use service because they need an invite to be a part of the conversations that take place there.

Robert Scoble is on record as stating that he will go where ever he can have interesting conversations so for him, a place that has a wall up on people’s ability to access the service, is not going to work so well for him.  This is why he has embraced FriendFeed with feverish zeal.

My opinion?  Jaiku had promise.  With the advent of FriendFeed I’m not sure what they can offer in the way of lifestreaming.  FriendFeed has really implemented this feature really well.  Also, now that Twitter is really looking into their stability issues and taking them more seriously, Jaiku might become a needless service within the next 6 months.  If Jaiku can finish their move to the Google App Engine and open up to let everyone sign up, they might have a chance at bring people over from Twitter (since it’s going to take them a while to fix their stability issues).  However, convincing folks to move from Twitter to Jaiku is going to be difficult, even given Twitters issues.

Twitter’s problems have revolved around 2 things 1) stability and 2) lack of features.  Well FriendFeed has pretty much solved both issues, though it is a different kind of service.  People for some reason stick with Twitter regardless of its issues.  With that in mind and the fact that FriendFeed has a solid lock on the lifestreaming concept, I think that Jaiku will die and dissappear into the ether of the internet.  Of course, Google could have plans for it with regards to their mobile OS, Android but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Twitter has been pretty much unusable the last 2 weeks.  Things started to get bad last week, and then over the weekend they had a database crash which has caused them to turn features off and have extremely slow performance since Friday.

Twitter has never been perfect.  Its consistant downtime has been the subject of much debate since the the service debuted a little over a year ago.  The continuance of this downtime at greater intervals over the last month has rendered the service all but useless.

Current issues include:

• No pagenation on Twitter website
• No IM support (some of us don’t have unlimited text messaging)
• Constant “Limit Exceeded” on API driven applications (even when there is NO way an app could have hit the limit) - this is apparently due to a throttle placed on the API that Twitter has not made extremely known.
• Slow performance resulting in missing updates completely or getting them late

With these kind of issues, and no real word on when things will return to “normal” it is distressing to see that people still use and rely on this service (myself included).  Imagine what would happen if someone like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears started using Twitter.  The service would crumble from the spike in usage.  Twitter needs to get its act together, because if this keeps up much longer, people really will move to something else (FriendFeed?) if they find Twitter to be this continuously unreliable.

Robert Scoble recently said that he was moving away from TechMeme as his homepage in favor of FriendFeed.  He has also stated on several occasions that he goes where the conversation is and that everyone he follows on Twitter (which is everyone that follows him) is relevent and interesting.

This is a new approach to social media.  Everyone is a friend (both onine and offline), and everyone has something interesting to say.  This is a far cry from the tech/bloging elite that used to be in the game (and which many consider Scoble to be a part of).  It is interesting that someone on Scoble’s level would take such a drastic step away from that blogging elite in search of the smaller voice.  But he might be onto something.

You see lately, I’ve moved away from sites like Digg, where I used to get a nice chunk of my daily news (both tech and other kinds) to sites like FriendFeed (via AlertThingy or Twhirl) to get my news.  Sure I subscribe to a lot of the more “famous” bloggers on FriendFeed, but I’ve taken the outlook of subscribing to everyone that subscribes to me (assuming it doesn’t look like spam when i look at the account) on FriendFeed and Twitter in hopes of finding new and more interesting content.

I think part of the idea behind this is the concept that not everyone thinks like you do.  If you only listen to like-minded people you never really learn anything.  The search to learn more and gain more knowledge about all areas of a subject, be it tech, parenting, or even personal finance can lead to a better understanding of the world around you.  As an “on record” republican, I like having discussions with democrats and other more liberal than me.  Because I learn things.  This is much of the same reason for following so many people on various social sites.  The more input you have, the more you are likely to be able to output because you understand so much more.  Occasionally though, you will get a person who just wants to be rude.  Fortunately, you can decide whom to follow and unfollow at your convenience.  This makes it easy to control the input you receive.

Of course I’m not suggesting that constant input is the road to complete understanding or enlightenment.  And just because you read something does not mean you understand it.  But there is some benefit to listening to a constant flow of opinions both agreeable and not.  It also brings you more voices.  As more people subscribe to you, you can subscribe back and hear what they have to say on things.  This is a great way to keep up with both the A-Listers and the new listers.

This weekend Twitter had an interesting kind of break this week.  The below video contains my opinions on the breakage.  I’m trying to integrate video commentary into this website and this is kind of an alpha video.  I plan to work on the quality of the video.  Anyone have any webcam recommendations?