Nels Wadycki

For those of you just joining me, about a month ago I was trying to figure out what to do about the fragmentation created by microblogging platforms like Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce vs. traditional blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, etc. I was not the only one pondering this concept, and what to do about all the feeds that can be generated from participation in Web 2.0 type social web applications.

Well, I think Jaiku has solved my problem. Jaiku seems like another Twitter at first, but looking further, you can add feeds from other sources and have items in those feeds show up in your Jaiku stream. So, for example, I’ve got my Flickr stream (public photos, of course), my Recently Played Tracks from last.fm, the posts from this blog, as well as those from my “aspiring novelist” blog, and (recently) my Twitters!

By making my Twitters public, I can add them to my Jaiku stream, but leave my Jaiku stream for friends only, and then use Jaiku for my private microblog posts. Did you follow that? Yeah, I didn’t really either. I’m not so sure it’s best way to work things, but I’m going to try it for a while.

Of course, what I feel is the strongest feature of Jaiku (which stems from it’s aggregation of feeds) is the ability to unsubscribe from other users feeds on an individual basis. In my previous post, I said:

the question still remains, will people want to see somewhat random photos just appearing in my feed whenever I happen to upload them, mixed in with the .plan posts as well as the more-than-one-paragraph posts? Or is it just better to have 3 separate feeds for photos, twitters, and posts, and let people subscribe to whatever they choose?

That question has been answered by Jaiku! Now, my friends can check out my Jaiku feed, and there’s everything you could ever want (and probably more). And if it’s too much too handle, you can go in and individually unsubscribe from the feeds of mine that don’t interest you.

Yes, at a high level, it’s basically an RSS reader filtered through a social network. But it also allows you to post to the feed from the application, as well as comment on other users posts (which is nice for platforms that you’d otherwise have to be a member of in order to comment). The commenting is also something that I feel is improved over Twitter, since there’s likely to be less of the @somebody kind of posting taking place.

Additionally, Jaiku has a pretty kick ass looking mobile application. I don’t have a phone that can run it yet, and I haven’t tried the plain vanilla Jaiku mobile stuff yet, so I’ll refrain from any comment beyond “it’s pretty.”

Speaking of pretty, my final note about Jaiku, you can add little icons to your posts! And if you post from Facebook (for some reason) there’s more than twice as many little icons to choose from!

There you have it. My thoughts on Jaiku. I think I could talk more about the app and it’s implications and uses and Things Of That Nature, but this post is long enough for now.