If you don't really follow many internet trends, Twitter and Jaiku are two painfully hip services that allow you to post exactly what you're doing and where you're located at any given time. It's a very simple formula that seems to be all the rage at the moment, and I admit I'm hooked!
I learned about Twitter from my very smart friend Feeeeeeeeeeeelix and have been using it for about a month. I think the mix of a clean and easy to read homepage mixed with the Twitterrific for Mac client I reviewed yesterday makes it a very nice distraction, plus I've been added by some interesting people and can keep up to date with their shenanigans.
My Twitter profile page
Anyway reading Scripting News this morning and looking through my unread tweets I read that Dave Winer has got himself a Jaiku account. At first I rolled my eyes at the prospect of another website that I thought obviously was just riding the wave and shamelessly copying, but while the two services have a similar basic premise (aka: post what you're doing) they have radically different features, and I consider my initial position officially debunked!
From what I can tell Jaiku seems to be an aggregator for Web 2.0 goodness as well, so whenever one of my RSS/Atom/KitchenSink feeds is updated somewhere (post a comment on my blog, post a new show, upload a photo or bookmark something) it will be posted on my Jaiku page. Ironically I can even use this feature to subscribe to my Twitter account, continue to post on it and have my tweets routed to Jaiku as well, until I can decide which to use full time. Argh!
The other advantage of Jaiku is the commenting feature, with one click you can view all the comments for a particular post. I posted two messages and had half a dozen replies to each within an hour, crazy!
My Jaiku profile page
Who needs MySpace when you have these slick services I ask you now? Really makes me think though how dependent I really am on Web 2.0 stuff, and it seemed to happen so gradually I didn't see it coming, crazy!
Seem to have said "crazy" a lot on this post. Crazy.