So some of this post has been sitting in the "queue" of ideas fermenting away, and then over the past couple of days a minor flurry of activity was kicked off, that prompted me to finally post this. More on this "controversy" further down.
First, after some thought, here is my current view on the two oldest microblogging services:
Twitter feels more like old school blogging.
From how i see twitter, it has the same "mental model" as blogging.
Someone creates a single post, then there are some responses to that, comments == @ replies and DM == emails.
The difference is that unless you do some work (or use a range of third party tools), it is
Also Twitter, due to it's limited functionality, but existence of an API that exposes all of that functionality, has caused an eco-system to grow up around twitter. This eco-system also has a secondary effect, in that now there are not only people writing about how to use twitter but also what tools are best to use with it.
Jaiku feels more like a forum.
This is probably due to the threaded nature of the conversations.
The fact that replies can use markdown and can be longer also contributes to this feeling.
The channels also help to separate off some of the noise as well.
Another thing that helps, is that the social circles in Jaiku seem to be slightly tighter, or at least that is my experience. For me this shows up as the same names showing up in threads, even though i am not following that particular person, so i can take a longer time getting to "know" them before following/friending them.
now about what inspired me actually do something with the ideas written above:
Ville Vesterinen put up a post on the Arctic Startup blog, where he outlines his idea that he will be spending more time on Twitter as the majority of the people he met at LeWeb08 were on twitter, and he thinks that he will get more from using that as his primary tool.
This caused a bit of a stir on Jaiku (along with a slight uptick in the number of Finns registered on Twitter i would guess).
Ville, to give him credit, follows this up with a second post and third post about the responses.
Possibly as a response to this (and also due to the general rumblings on #jaiku) Jyri announces in a blog post his understanding of some of the future plans for Jaiku.
Interestingly he also posts it to both Jaiku and twitter.
One of the hightlights of this was the comedy moment when this jaiku thread started up in response twitter post by one of Jaiku's more prolific contributers
Another highlight was @Spongefile's comment here
Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.
Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.
which i think has to be just about the best description/comparison of the two services i have seen in a while.
And also ties in with one of my all time favorite Merlin Mann quotes here
