With the obvious exception of Gmail, Google’s forays into social networking do not seem to have been as well-received. There is orkut, of course. Orkut is huge in some parts of the globe, so maybe this is a bad example; or at least, it’s an example of being somewhat North-America-centric in my perspective. That said, North America is where I’m at, and here, Orkut is no big splash. While even the non-internet savvy in North America are familiar with dozens of news stories about MySpace and Facebook, I doubt Orkut has popped up on most folks’ radar.
Jaiku seems to be in about the same boat. I had never heard of it until Google bought it, though I realize that many other early adopters had heard of it. It has most or all of twitter’s features, and a few of FriendFeeds, in that it can import feeds from other sites, such as Twitter.
If you’re going to use “all of the above” services, as a lot of early adopters seem to do, aggregation in Jaiku could be seen as overkill; if you aggregate Twitter to both Jaiku and FriendFeed, and also add Jaiku to FriendFeed, you’ll wind up with a duplicate of every tweet, which is probably not what you were going for. So, since I’m not ready to give up on Twitter, and FriendFeed has a cool functionality all it’s own that doesn’t replace other services, but rather augments them, I don’t do any aggregating in Jaiku.
So, what about Jaiku?
Despite not being as high-profile as Twitter, it does seem to becoming increasingly a choice of Twitterers who are either tired of Twitter’s continual issues, or else simply wanting a backup network in case Twitter never really does resolve said issues. Jaiku’s comment threads do seem to make ongoing conversations much easier to follow than they are on Twitter.
While it is possible to have a long conversation on Twitter — people do it all the time — it can sometimes be hard to follow. If you reply to someone, you are not replying to a specific Tweet. That is, you are, but you are replying to their most recent tweet as of the moment you hit post, regardless of whether or not that was the actual tweet you intended to respond to. Everyone on Twitter understands this, but it does make it very easy for the competing services in this space to offer an improvement.
In fact, of all the services that I can think of which could be seen as potential competition for Twitter — Pownce, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Plurk — all of them have better comment/conversation features than Twitter. As has been noted many many times, that really doesn’t seem to matter; Twitter has the userbase, which is so far its killer feature.
Back to Jaiku; I’m sure there is more in store for Jaiku in the future. It is being ported to Google’s App Engine, so that will almost certainly provoke a spike of interest when it’s complete. Jaiku is also still an “invite only” service at this point. When the door is opened up a little wider, I think we’ll see some more activity and buzz about Jaiku.
Until then; I have about a dozen Jaiku invites. Leave a comment, if you’d like to check it out.