Pete's Eats

It seems like nearly all of my friends are Twitter addicts these days and I hope that I don’t offend anyone of them with this opinion but…

I’m increasingly captured by the whole concept of deliberate presence notifications and less so by the global chat that twitter seems to have become. I’ve been playing with Jaiku a lot this week and I find myself so much more engaged by it over Twitter. For me, Twitter has become less about presence and much more of a global chat room. It also has a sort of adolescent slant that I don’t find in Jaiku – it sort of reminds me of MySpace to be honest.

When I started using Twitter I had a bit of difficulty overcoming the urge to build up yet another social network of all the usual suspects and I tried to keep it ‘local’ and use it purely as a way of noting my various locations and statuses to people who could do something with that information if they wanted to. It worked in the early days too – twittering that I was off to Bill’s for breakfast regularly flushed various friends out of the woodwork whence they came down to Bill’s too. Eventually though, I gave in and ‘friended’ people who live in different countries and who could, perhaps, use my presence information on the occassions that we’re in the same town, at the same event etc. From that moment though, Twitter lost meaning for me – it became too diluted to be of as much use and I have become very aware that people in Japan or the US don’t want to know which Starbucks I’m in and so on.

Last summer I signed up for Jaiku. I had loaded the client onto my Nokia N90 but found that it killed my battery very quickly by having the Jaiku application running all the time. Researching the idea of presence again recently though, I rediscovered Jaiku and have installed it onto my N73. It still eats battery, but nowhere near as quickly as before. Aside from that, I’m enjoying using Jaiku *alot*. It is much more useful for me, provides a lot more information on my friends digital presence across a wide range of inputs and generally feels much more ‘grown up’ than Twitter does.

I have integrated my blog posts, my Last.fm trace, my Plazes information and my upcoming.org events into my Jaiku. If you’re my friend on there, then you can get a very good overview of my complete presence integrating my thoughts (my blog), my media consumption (Last.fm), my event plans (upcoming) and my current whereabouts and availability too (from the Jaiku app on my phone). To me, this idea of complete presence is exciting and much more informative and useful than the throwaway chat on Twitter.

I know that most people are engaging with Twitter simply because of the low overhead it requires to post but I think this will be it’s ultimate downfall. The low cost dilutes the quality of the information added and global chat has been done many times before much better (think, irc). Jaiku requires much more effort (but it’s in no way arduous) and I think this is reflected in the quality of the information presented.

SXSWi brought Twitter to the masses. I hope Jaiku reaches similar heights because the biggest problem at the moment is convincing my friends to sign up and/or use it alongside other things like Twitter. (If the service dropouts, desparingly slow response times and flaky friends system doesn’t push them away from Twitter first that is).

I’ll continue to use Twitter too but, for me, Jaiku is so much more rewarding.