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Sadly, Jaiku isn’t much of a Twitter alternative

May 29, 2008 |

Shane Perris from Techwhimsy has an interesting guest post over on Sarah Perez’s blog about the current state of Jaiku:

Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Since my divorce from Twitter, I have been playing with Jaiku and Pownce, but don’t really find either to go much beyond what Twitter does. As Shane bemoans, Google seems to keep Jaiku lingering around without adding any features to it. And I guess that makes sense, given that it has apparently become a “20% project” at Google now.

The state of development around Jaiku is showing the same kind of stagnation. There is barely a 3rd party client around and while Jaiku has this very interesting “Channel” functionality, it seems very underused. Some other nice aspect of Jaiku are the built in ability to draw in outside feeds - though if I started dropping my Jaiku posts into FriendFeed, that would surely get annoying.

Maybe as more people switch over from Twitter (or maybe I will look like an idiot if nobody does…), Google will start putting some more effort into this project (or at least use the developers it brought in from Jaiku for building something similar and better. That, in turn, would give 3rd party developers some incentive to start developing on top of Jaiku again.

Until then, I couldn’t agree with Shane more - Google has indeed dropped the ball with respect to Jaiku.

Because of this, I think I will stick with my original assessment that instead of moving to Twitter clones, those who move away from Twitter will most likely by-pass all the direct Twitter competitors for FriendFeed.

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