Twitter VS Jaiku

Microblogging has been with us for some time. For those of you who don’t know the term, it refers to mini blogs, sometimes updated daily or more than once a day. The most popular microblogging service at the moment is Twitter. Some have predicted it’s demise, I have also blogged about it before as well as it’s competitor Jaiku.

I have been using mostly Jaiku for quite some time, but recently, it became very quiet. Within my group of contacts on Jaiku there seems to have been an exodus towards Twitter. This is rather fascinating due to the fact that both these platforms offer seemingly identical services and have very much the same features. However, the slight difference in strategy and information architecture might be what is causing Twitters popularity.

For starters, Twitter knows no ‘threads’. Communication is flat. I can post something but there is no way for any of my contacts to reply to that in the same way as you would reply to this blog post, for instance. Every reply to my Twitter post has the same “weight” as the original post to which they are replying. It is a “reply to” but it is not nested inside the first reply. This result of this is that people feel more inclined to post, there is little or no pressure on them to write a good, interesting or popular post, to the contrary, they are simply stating something that is relevant to them or their environment (followers). You could almost say that this way of communicating goes against the web 2.0 philosophy of co-creation and participation. It also makes it fairly hard to have a real discussion on Twitter. If I am replying to something a contact of mine said, I am making a new Tweet. My followers who have not seen the original Tweet will not know the context of my subsequent Tweet. The results are cryptic, one side posts showing up: “Yes, I agree”, “I will be there”, “Congratulations” etc. It is like listening to a phone conversation.

Jaiku on the other hand, has nested replies. This means that if I post a new mini post on Jaiku, my contacts can reply to that post as a comment. In this sense it heightens the pressure on posting: “what if no one responds?”, resulting in less posts. The flip side of this effect is that more thought might be given to a Jaiku post than a Tweet. Every time you post, you feel the pressure of having someone reply.

Then, on the other hand, Jaiku does allow you to import feeds from other sources, these can be blog feeds, your Last.fm profile, Flickr photos etc. I can choose not to see my contacts’ feeds but this isn’t turned off by default, so many won’t ever switch it off. These feeds get imported and displayed to all of my contacts and depending on the amount of aggregated content you have as well as the amount of contacts, you will usually see more feed content than posts:

The result is that we have two opposing philosophies here: firstly, the unspoken need for higher quality postings and secondly the ability to aggregate many feeds into your post stream. The result is: few written posts and a waterfall of aggregated content. To me, this is where Jaiku has been failing. Admittedly, if me and my contacts were more active, this would not be a problem but already within the first few days of Twitter (with less contacts) I have been having more (human generated) activity.
Now I don’t think that this effect could have been foreseen by Jaiku, it is interesting to look at how two features, namely the ability to leave a nested reply to a post and to import feeds/content can fundamentally change how people interact with your site or service.