I have been experimenting more recently with both Twitter and Jaiku which are both micro blogging solutions. If you aren’t familiar with these two solutions they are basically software that let you say what you are doing right now to a set of people who have expressed an interest in hearing about your daily goings on.
Twitter is the first of these two systems and the more popular one. You can twitter from your cell phone via email or SMS or from a web browser. Among the 56 people that I currently follow a message may range from a recent blog post, a breaking news story to what they are having for dinner. Twitter is a one way conversation so some messages are of the form “@chris2x: I agree” which is a message being broadcast to all of the users followers but targeted to a comment made by the users chris2x. This is a bit silly and points out the need for comments. You can also get twitter messages through IM so this is a very timely system.
Jaiku
Jaiku has, in my opinion, a better interface than twitter with the addition of comments and the ability to have Jaiku monitor your blog, podcast, flickr, etc RSS feeds. So when you post something to your blog it automatically shows up on Jaiku. Since Twitter can produce an RSS feed some people update Jaiku by posting to twitter which is oddly circular.
Two deficiencies in Jaiku are that unlike Twitter you follow everyone who follows you. Twitters with large entourages have already learned on Twitter not to do that if you want any minute in your life without interruptions. It also lacks the IM updates that Twitter provides.
Popularity: 5% [?]
