/dev/null/kevin

My daughter learned to play duck-duck-goose at school and then wanted to play at home with just her and me.  It's really not the same game with just two people.  Such is Twitter.

Twitter has its uses but it only works when everyone plays. A lot of Sun bloggers twitter, but (and no offense) none that I really want to follow.  I like to read John Clingan's blog, but I don't need to know that he's stuck in traffic.

The truth for me is that almost none of the people that I would twitter with use twitter.   Like everyone, I have family and friends I stay in contact with, along with my coworkers, ex-coworkers, my band, and my hockey teams.  Each group has a different method of communicating and staying in touch.  Some could use twitter, but not all can or will.  With so many methods out there today for communicating (phone, email, IM, and just plain old conversation), it's hard to add another one.

So far, the best use of Twitter has been to follow some blog sites that also have Twitter feeds.  However, I can already see the amount if noise rising to the point of uselessness.  Twitter also goes down often.  And my often I mean every day.  You will tired of their LOLCATs error pages quickly.

I also tried Jaikuat the recommendation of some bloggers.  While it does have a lot of nice features it also has some drawbacks. The best feature it has is called channels.  Like and IRC channel, you can broadcast your message to just the channel and only people who subscribe to that channel get the message.  This is perfect for sending a message to one circle of friends that another circle wouldn't care about.  I could send a message to my hockey team without bothering my family, who doesn't care that the game time moved.  Unfortunately, Jaiku doesn't allow people to create their own channels yet, and the few channels they created have a VERY high noise to signal ratio.  In the end, it wasn't worth subscribing to any Jaiku-created channels.

Another good Jaiku feature was the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, so you can pretty much follow any feed out there, including twitter.  This is a double edged sword in that you can quickly overload yourself with too many feeds.  Also, the feed reader is slow and can delay the receipt of messages.  So, you really have to balance out what's important to receive using Jaiku and what you just want to load into a regular feed reader.

The last Jaiku feature that I liked was a simple one.  On Twitter you are http://twitter.com/user but on Jaiku you are http://user.jaiku.com.  The difference is that I can search for old Jaiku posts easily using Google's "site" parameter.  e.g., I can search for "foobar site:user.jaiku.com" and find any post with "foobar" in it from that user.  I don't think I can do with with Twitter.  If there's an easy way to search Twitter, let me know!

And, of course, no one I know well uses Jaiku so I was in the same duck-duck-goose boat as Twitter.

Here is my comparison between Twitter and Jaiku.

In the end, I'll stick with twitter.  I may even write some tweets, but I don't know who I'm even writing to.  I'm http://twitter.com/kevinchu.

Tags: twitter | jaiku