6/7/2007
Jaiku - Enhancements? Add-ons? - Can activity be construed as progress?
Here’s some news on what’s going on with things at Jaiku. For those of you who haven’t been watching closely, I see Jaiku gaining traction, but slowly. It hasn’t gone viral like Twitter did. At least not yet. I see that as a good thing for sustainability. 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 of.
That said, some of the *new* things don’t impress me a whole lot. Read the Twitterectomy post and you’ll see what I’d like in Jaiku that’s missing
NEW PRESENCE BADGES ARE FLASH
Jaiku has cool, new presence badges to display your latest updates on your blog or any web page. Simply copy HTML code provided and paste it in the source of your site. If your site doesn’t support Flash, you can still use the old Javascript badges.http://Jaiku.com
Click on Settings and Badges.
This is a bit of a ho hum for me. Short messages that can appear on my blog. Ok. It’s nice enough but it’s nothing terribly exciting really
ADD JAIKU TO FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, & WORDPRESS
Read and post Jaikus from Facebook, Wordpress and Google.
And we’d want to do this because? I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t do anything worthwhile for me. It’s mildly interesting, but doesn’t add much in terms of value from where I sit.
NEW JAIKU SITES
Jaikuvision – Your Jaiku messages and locations pop up on a map.
http://jaikuvision.netSquaknest - Post presence updates from Second Life to Jaiku. http://www.squawknest.com/
Jaikuvision is like Twittervision. An excellent time waster for the unemployed, unproductive idle minds who have no reason to be productive. And Second Life? Sorry, but my first life is too busy to consider that anything but a monumental waste to begin with.
So there’s some activity, but activity and progress aren’t necessarily related. I remain watchful, hopeful, but I grow more skeptical each day.
I said I was bailing on Twitter for a week, and using Jaiku and Facebook. While I have serious concerns about Facebook and where it might lead, give it another week or two and that may be the only one I use. I’m being generous with Jaiku at this point because I am hoping to see some news from them real soon. There’ve been some hints and I like the concept of Jaiku better than any other I’ve seen to date.
Technorati Tags: Jaiku, Twitter, Facebook
Filed by Ken at 11:54 am under Technology, Unified Communications
Ken, thanks for the post. The third-party applications were developed by members of the Jaiku community on their own time. Props to the authors. I personally use the iGoogle widget, Juhu, Jaikuberry, and the MacOS widget. They are important to me and my Jaiku experience. Our intention was to make the larger community aware of them. That’s all.
With regard to the badges, the old ones needed a makeover. The new ones are pretty cool. For those of us who post presence badges, I like the new ones more than the old ones.
Were the applications or badges positioned as a big kahuna of news? Nope. Are they “ho hum”? Perhaps, but a bunch of good people (most on their own time) put personal effort and creativity into creating them. So I’d rather give them some credit.
Were the apps or badges positioned as strategic breakthroughs? Nope.
Can activity be construed as progress? We can view that from several standpoints. If a youth web site with a million readers were turned on by cool presence badges, 20,000 people signed up as result and engaged in interesting conversation, I would give props to the badges. They still might be ho-hum versus the next release of the mobile app. Because that’s what you want to see.
But the marketplace is wide, vast and diverse. And hopefully Jaiku can deliver on a timetable that pleases everyone. A tall order, but I know they are working it.