Day 4: there's another Jeremy Dennis, on Jaiku

I'm having a busy day, so obviously I stop and do an ego search. Particularly now ex.plode.us has reanimated that concept in my Brain 2.0 ...and I pick up the scent of another one. He's on Jaiku.

Jaiku???

A quick search finds me a lot of ding-dongs in techie blogger which roughly read like this:

I heard your blog-gang are junking their Twitters and getting Jaikus. Flame and
Fume! Some blather about Ruby on Rails. How dare you? I'm still using
Twitter! I'm not! Jaiku is loadz better! I heard your blog-gang are junking
their Jaikus and going back to their Twitters! LOL!

OK, I'm being harsh. But I swear, some commenters really read like they miss the way flame wars used to be, you know? So I join Jaiku and run a quick people search to check out the competition. He is:

• Playing Starcraft 2
• Watching The Office Season 3
• Watching DL.TV from [his] ipod onto a digital projector

... and his mates are all feeds from Twitter. Some of them are web celebrities -- look, there's Scott Kurtz. Ah (penny drops). You can use the people search on Jaiku to find people's Twitters, blogs, etc.

Other than that, if you're like Jeremy, Jaiku may well be for you. It has "channels" covering a bunch of standard interests, and nothing about the name suggests that you might be a wittering twit (which is sort of implicit in Twitter's nomenclature). On the whole, it seems like an altogether more serious place. Which is kind of its downfall ...

The first time I decided to try the posting by sms thing (October 2004, using an LJ utility) I knew it was a fairly bonkers idea, that was likely to confuse and mystify. Twitter embraces the absurdity; Jaiku is SRS website for SRS people.

And, given that I'm pretty secure in my identity as a wittering twit, and my excessive social connectivity leaves little time for stalking, I'll probably be sticking with Twitter.

Verdict: OK BYE!