Twitter Problems – Reconsidering Jaiku

Twitter’s had a number of problems lately. Seems it all started when they had the system down for upgrades a couple of weeks ago. Since then they’re on par with Second Life for technical problems. The two blur together for me: is it Twitter that has the database problem, with Second Life affected by VPN connections between servers, or is it the other way around?

All of this has me looking for alternatives. I don’t think I could stand Pownce again. I never liked the design and their AIR client was too buggy.

Jaiku was worth another look, though. It’s missing my social network, but overall it wasn’t as awkward as Pownce. My biggest problem with Jaiku was that I kept getting redundant Twitter feeds hours after the fact.  A Tweet from D’Arcy would echo from Alan and Andy long after I’d seen it, with the attribution confused. It was like an echo chamber, with no way to stop. So I stopped watching.

But with Twitter in trouble I thought it was worth another look. And I’m glad I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was a note from Jaiku itself (1 month, 2 weeks ago no less):

Jaiku will be moving to the new Google App Engine. More on the Jaiku blog: http://tinyurl.com/3o2kkr

I figured by this point the move would be done. So what had changed? The first thing I checked was if I could use SMS on my iPhone to send Jaikus. Back in the day, it just didn’t work. My only choice was to have a Safari bookmark, which I didn’t like. Now? The test message went through, I was able to reply, and now I can use SMS to sent to Jaiku.

More importantly, as I started browsing my friends, I noticed an option for each feed they send to Jaiku: I can unsubscribe from just that feed. So now I can get Alan’s Jaikus, his Flickr stream, but not his Twitter feed or CogDogBlog if I don’t want.

That’s exactly the kind of control I would need for Jaiku to work. And so I’m back. Not giving up on Twitter yet – I’ve been playing with brightkite lately and like the ability to send posts to Twitter – but I am going to post to Jaiku more, just to see what happens.