6/4/2007
Today, Twitterectomy. Tomorrow, Jaiku and Facebook
This evening I performed a self-Twitterectomy. I swore off Twitter for at least 7 days. Once I post a link to this post there, I won’t b other with Twitter for at least a week. If I don’t develop a case of the bends or suffer other ill-effects, it’s quite likely I just won’t bother with Twitter any more.
Twitter was great while it worked. Critical mass has crushed it out of usefulness. TheIM interface hasn’t worked for a long time. I was doing that on my N800 with Gtalk for a time with good results, but it doesn’t work. Direct messages don’t work. Period. I can force them to email, but ya know, if I wanted 140 character messages in my email, I’d tell people to send me short email.
For me, Twitter stopped adding value a while back. Now it’s worse. No it detracts value. it doesn’t work on the web half the time. It takes more time and work, conscious effort, to send a 140 character message than it’s with.
Frankly, Twitter’s in the shitter. It had to be said.
That leaves Jaiku and Facebook for now. A few days ago I wrote Twitter, Jaiku or Facebook? How many touchpoints do you need?. As I said in that post, there is this dirty, oily feeling that Facebook is trying to become the evil empire, but Facebook has one thing going for it. It works via SMS. It works, and that’s one thing I need.
Facebook also has issues. The mobile web site sucks on a handheld. I’m forced to reauthenticate with every session. There’s no ability to remember me. This is easily dealt with via the N800. The N95 and N800 combination make Facebook a pretty useful tool. At times. But I don’t want to need both. I want to easily use either.
Then there are the apps. The ones everyone’s raving about. Have you stopped raving long enough to look at what they do, cause it’s pretty damn close to nothing. The Twitter app sucks partial Twitter into Facebook. But click a link and you’re gone to Twitter (and probably looking at the damn cat or in terminal hourglass waiting for something to happen. Try the Jaiku app. Click a link and off you go. I have to say, I learned out to click my way off to another web site years ago. As value, that doesn’t cut it.
The Flickr app looked nice. Too bad refresh doesn’t actually refresh. It doesn’t do anything really.
What Facebook has given us is potential. So far, I’ve tried a number of apps and none of them impress me. But the text messaging works, I like the friends I hang out with there. It has potential. So I’m hanging in with it a while longer.
Jaiku’s the one I really want. It’s on the cusp of greatness, yet so painfully slow to evolve. I like the way it aggregates my lifestream of information. I love the potential of the Nokia client. I relish the way it can pull in the feeds I give it. I wish it could pick up my Facebook updates as handily as it does Twitter’s, but I don’t think Facebook outputs a usable RSS feed. At least not that I’ve found.
Still, Jaiku at least leaves me with a wish list to hope for.
- Give me control over the feeds. Let the user configure how often each feed gets polled. Give users that granularity of control
- Get the user created channels live. I know that’s coming at any moment. It’s a start, but don’t let it be the end. Do not let grass grow.
- Get the short codes and SMS working. And be prepared to deal with infrastructure support so you can avoid the constant downtime Twitter’s had. There’s no excuse to have taken this long to get US short codes activated, and the “this stuff takes time” song is and old broken record. That, and it’s bullshit. It doesn’t take anywhere near this much time and effort to set up shortcodes.
- Get that Nokia app improved. You gave us a taste and then did nothing. Nothing. Again,. frankly it’s getting tiresome.
I for one, know that Jaiku is in the middle of gathering some funding. I’ve worked for startups. I’ve managed and run them. In today’s net climate, you have to be up front with us. If you say “bear with us while we get funding to operate,” and provide updates and share your pain, I’ll be quite tolerant. if you tell me something’s coming any day as a delaying tactic, I’m likely to call bullshit and openly flame you for making feeble excuses. Jaiku is starting to feel more like the latter case and that troubles me. Don’t make me hate you.
Oddly enough, I’m trading Facebook Wall notes with Stuart Henshall as I write this. There’s an area that applies to social networking that all of these YASNs (Yet another social network. And yes Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook are just as muchs YASNs as Orkut, Tribe and Friendster) face. There’s a privacy issue that none have ever done a really good job at. That’s because they’ve all leaped into the present without thinking about identity management and the future.
Friends is too binary a decision point. Yes or no are the options. Users need granularity of control regarding layers of friendship. And the old ring of trust security model won’t do. It never worked. There are privacy issues with user identity, and with friendships and trust relationships that have eluded every YASN approach to come along the pike. So far. But that can change. It will change before long and the game of social networking willl invent itself anew.
Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook, are you up to tossing the game out the window and jumping into a new model with layers of gooey trust and user control? Are you able to reinvent yourselves fast enough to hang on for the ride? I’ll be interested to see how you handle the future, however long your future might be.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, YASN, social networks, identity management
Filed by Ken at 8:46 pm under General, Tech in General, Technology
[...] pal Ken Camp has performed a Twitterectomy on himself declaring that he will stop using the service for 7 days and, assuming no ill effects [...]
I understand what you mean about Twitter. I joined, because I do that, stuck with it for a while and then went to Jaiku. I’m using Jaiku a lot more. Twitter seemed to suck the life out of me, requiring a more shallow, and yet somehow personal commitment. I would rather learn and I find Jaiku a better resource. In the initial stages I had high hopes for twitter. I lost them. I don’t know enough about facebook to make a judgment. I just joined the other day.
What do you think about netvibes? I can’t really get a sense of it other than it sort of does what tumblr does, aggregate, but then so does jaiku.
To be fair, I don’t use any of this stuff for business. I just use it for fun and learning. The experience, if you will. I probably am not a good judge of how effective or viable these are for business purposes. I just enjoy the game of it all.
Have a great day!
Sheryl Breuker
I think you’re right on the money Sheryl. When Twitter started, it was easy, relaxed and fun. Now it’s cumbersome, hard to use and down half the time. It can suck the life out of us. I want, even need that contact with my friends, but have to find it through easier ways.
I really like Jaiku a lot for the potential. It’s so much richer and experience being able to see blog snips, Flick pics and still have the short updates. But as you point out, with comments, there’s some actual learning potential through the conversational aspect. I really like what Jaiku can become as it grows, but I’m impatient.
I’ve only ever glanced at netvibes myself. I didn’t ever see anything that caught my interest, but I’ve wondered if I was just missing the point somewhere.
For me, this stuff isn’t business except in that some work colleagues make up a big part of my circle of friends and they’re the people I try to stay in touch with a lot.
[...] Camp has sworn off Twitter for a week. Too slow, too buggy. But he's not too enamoured of the alternatives he's [...]
[...] Twitter grew into dysfunctionality and has been very unstable. That led me to perform a Twitterectomy, and so far, I’ve suffered no ill effects to speak [...]
Ken, I appreciate your points about Jaiku. Let me try to shed some light on what we are currently working on.
Control over feeds
Some services have asked us to slow down our refresh rate for the feeds to ease load on their servers. This is why we fetch feeds in batches with a delay. For more on this, see http://tinyurl.com/2tdvad
User-created channels
This is our current priority. We’re concerned about spam though, and we’ve had to take measures to prevent possible holes spammers could use. This work is invisible but we feel it’s still important at this point.
SMS
The slowness in setting up the U.S. shortcode is my fault. We’ve submitted the application no fewer than 5 times, but it has boomeranged back due to failure to meet a particular operator’s requirements for e.g. “double opt-in” for recurring alerts. We have a test shortcode in the U.S. but the real one is still not active.
Nokia app
We’ve recently moved into private beta with the new version of Jaiku Mobile, which supports streams and commenting. I’ll email an invitation to the private beta to you so you can preview the new version before we go out with a public release.
Hope this helps. We highly value your feedback, so thanks a lot for bringing these questions up.
Jyri left such a thoughtful comment, I really wanted to reply in email. Here’s what I sent him so you don’t think I let his visit go by unnoticed.
Jyri,
Thanks so much for taking the time and leaving a thoughtful response to my post. While I may often seem critical, I’m actually a huge Jaiku fan. And I do understand the challenges of starting up with a distributed team. I think I’ll have something to post on that later on.
I do appreciate the technical complexities that impact the feed refresh rates and the user-created channels. That’s another topic I think I want to write about in a broaded context. We users tend to overlook what it takes to process all the feeds. I know I forget unless I stop to think about it in those terms. It’s easier for us to mentally think of it as we would our own feed reader, but it’s really quite different.
I know the user-created channels is a hot item for you. I assume there’s a bit of demand that I just don’t see. I’m not sure I find it terribly useful and fear the user channels will become as widespread as chatrooms were on Yahoo. I fear without some stringent controls it could easily become unusable. But I’m keeping those thoughts to myself mostly as I watch how it unfolds.
The SMS issue is one I think is important, but that you do need to control. It could be a launch point to make Jaiku grow more viral and then face some of the issues Twitter has dealt with badly. On the other hand, dealing with them really well would be a huge differentiator and could really make Jaiku take off.
I would love to assist in testing the new Nokia app. I’m more than happy to test and not talk about it openly. I’ve got a number of devices and I help test things all the time. In the future, should you find the need to develop a Windows Mobile app, I’d be more than happy to test that as well.
As a side note, I anticipate that I’ll be writing a “Why I left Twitter for Jaiku and Facebook” soon. I’m quickly reaching the conclusion that the two, provide far more capablity than users realize. I’m finding that life after Twitter has actually been much better. Certainly there are things that I’m no longer receiving unless my Jaiku friends have included their Twitter feeds. As a very active user of all of those, it’s been an interesting start to a week without Twitter. A pleasant surprise.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment and giving me more to think about. I really appreciate it.
Ken
Social Networking with Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook…
This post is based on Today, Twitterectomy. Tomorrow, Jaiku and Facebook, something I posted on my personal blog this past Monday.I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we use social networking communications tools as part of our work life. I also …
[...] Monday I posted Today, Twitterectomy. Tomorrow, Jaiku and Facebook and declared myself on a week-long hiatus from Twitter. As addicting as Twitter can be, the week [...]