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Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce: compared and contrasted

Listening to:	Against All Odds, Phil Collins
Reading:	Rant, Chuck Paluhniuk
Weather:	68, overcast, lovely

Enjoying a hazelnut cappuccino I made with my spiffy yardsale-found espresso maker. Tres groovy.

Like thousands of people I discovered Twitter through Leo and the the TWiTs back in March. I wasn't immediately fascinated, since I'm not big on instant messaging functionality generally, I don't have a cell phone to use the mobile aspect (though I do have my iPAQ hx4700 in my pocket at almost all times), and I don't have a need to be constantly updating or updated on the sundry details of what people are eating for lunch, etc. But the interface is pretty nice, and the social networking functionality is pretty easy with nice little quilts of tiny icons of friends and a public stream (everybody's posts default to public). And since Leo and CC and Winer and many of the techcelebs are totally about the constant what I ate for lunch thing, but also tasty tech tidbits, I can lurk and enjoy.

Then Leo jumped on (should I say pownced on? heheh) Jaiku, claiming first to avoid the TWiT/Twitter confusion, and second that the functionality was better. So I opened a Jaiku account, too. First to snag my usual username justpeace before some other punk got it, and second cuz I dig Leo. I found the interface also lovely, connectability similarly smooth, and I really dug the feature of being able to add in RSS feeds. For one thing, you can just use Twitter for posting and add your Twitter feed to your Jaiku, and badabing, you're rocking both seamlessly. But not all the babblers I like to check in with use Jaiku, so I still poke around Twitter now and again.

Then Jaiku lit up with the "please can I have a Pownce invite" stuff a few days ago. OK, I'll bite, what's Pownce? Uh, you guessed it, yet another incarnation of this stuff. Only this one, I find after listening to the latest TWiT, is a Kevin Rose product. Also I find, after opening yet another justpeace account, that the functionality is not meshing with my use. First, interface pretty, very Ning-like, but where's the public feed? How do I get friends besides inviting people which I have no interest in doing? I just like lurking amongst the hipnorati. And also what's with the stupid invite-only thing? I guess it's a marketing ploy, and a smooth scaling strategy, but I think it's mostly lame. And where's the RSS inputability? Maybe it's there and I just didn't see it, honestly I didn't spend much time there looking cuz it wasn't instafun like the other two. Oh, and did they spend $800k hiring a web 2.0 name creator, like the Brits did for that tragic Olympics logo?

So that's the cateye view on the fresh crop of tools for alerting the world every time you take a dump.

permalink posted by cat 6:50 AM

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