As you may have noticed, in spite of earlier apathetic feelings (to put it mildly) towards Twitter, the Witigonen crowd has adopted it in force. We have a twitter feed from us and even a page dedicated to the pulseofpdx stream, updated in real time. In spite of this, however, we're exploring other options- and by other options, I really mean Jaiku.

When I first started using Jaiku, I thought that it was simply trying to be twitter - but nobody I knew was on it, and I didn't see any real point, so I dropped it. Then, when we discovered a strong Twitter community here locally in Portland, I picked up Twitter, along with friends. It was amazing, talking with people I hadn't met about things happening in real time in Portland. The locality of it was key. But, twitter kind of sucks. It requires annoying hacks to do basic things and there is a ton of downtime. A ton of downtime. Aside from the downtime, this is fine; twitter is specialized and it's pretty good at what it does. The community around it is strong, which is the important bit. Third-party things make everything so much better.

So, I went back to Jaiku and cajoled a few Witigonen people to join me. With my twitter experience under my belt, I had a much greater understanding of what Jaiku is. A bit of reading online confirmed this (and would have saved me a great deal of trouble in figuring out the point of Jaiku).

Whereas twitter is primarily about interacting with a community, Jaiku is much more about what they call your lifestream. While without a community or group of friends, preferably a local one, twitter is (like any social networking site would be) really useless. Conversely, Jaiku doesn't emphasize the community, but rather emphasizes you. You're encouraged to put lots of rss feeds into your jaiku account. These are added as Presence updates (like Tweets), only they're not put as your current presence/status and your friends can easily opt out of them. I lately have been thinking of Jaiku as a combination of Tumblr and Twitter, which is a very appealing combo.

The curious thing about Jaiku in the comparison with Twitter is that Jaiku does community better than Twitter. Channels can be created by anybody and provide an actual forum for like-minded people to converse. (For what it's worth, there is now a #pdx and #witigonen channel on Jaiku - feel free to join). In addition to that, you can comment on individual presence/status updates, which is very nice (though it does reduce the number of messages being posted, which can give it a stagnant feel sometimes).

Jaiku's traffic has been dropping lately, which is a pity because it really is a great service. Google recently bought them and gave them some neglect it appears, causing them to suffer outages a la Twitter. There was very recently a planned outage that brought in some promised performance updates, so hopefully those are a thing of the past. I do hope that Jaiku flourishes and doesn't become something like Orkut, which seems essentially useless.

Overall, I vastly prefer Jaiku. Everything about it is better except third-party support and the community. I'm not worried about the third-party support, but I do hope that the community improves. Jaiku can do a couple of simple things that would help out - allow you to set a default home location is one so people can find other Jaiku-ers in their area. (You can set the location on any individual post, which is great.) The other thing would be the ability to give yourself a description of sorts so you're not stuck with purely examining a person's feed to determine who they are and what they're like. These are simple things that could help a lot.

At any rate, I have some Jaiku invites if you want to try it out. Let me know.