going to go downstairs to get some breakfast and then start writing it, have to be somewhere at 15:00, but i think i can pull it off before 17:00 today
For one week I forced myself to defect from Jaiku and to not only join Twitter, but to use the service actively. The reasons for this little experiment are numerous, with some of them being quite personal, but my main motivations was the recent lack of reliability that Jaiku has been experiencing and sheer curiosity to understand why Twitter is so popular in the first place.
Twitter was a service I constantly made fun of due to the misguided assumptions that conversations seemed impossible to maintain, the people using the service were predominantly based out of the West Coast of the USA, the UI was horrible and overly simplistic, and I still had fond memories of how unreliable Twitter was last year and the year before that.
What I discovered after about 9 days of using Twitter is that the service is powerful for a variety of different reasons and while it is not perfect, neither is Jaiku.
Twitter has an API that actually works and because of that a rich ecosystem of third party applications was built around the seemingly banal concept of sending 140 character messages. I can count the number of times I used twitter.com on one hand. Twitpic allows me to instantly share photos, Dabr allows me to have a rich mobile UI while on the go, TweetDeck enables me to have a comprehensive dashboard to the Twitter experience and various bloggers I know are using tools to have their RSS feeds published directly into their Twitter feed.
None of this worked right in Jaiku or it was too hard to setup since you had to provide an API key and that method of authentication had such a terrible user experience that only highly competent technical users took advantage. Twitter has confirmed that they're working on including OAuth support so at some point in the future you no longer have to give your credentials to third party services.
The biggest advantage that Twitter has compared to Jaiku, and this can not be underestimated, is the rich real time search capabilities.
Jaiku, which is now owned by Google, ironically has no search engine. Using TweetDeck I can follow, in real time, what people are saying about a particular keyboard. I'm tracking what all of Twitter has to say about Nokia, Helsinki and the Palm Pre. If you post a tweet asking what the temperature is in Helsinki or that your Nokia is broken, then I see it pop up in TweetDeck mere milliseconds after you hit enter and can interact with you.
That is powerful. That is addicting.
Twitter has direct messaging. It only works if I'm following you and you're following me, which is brilliant since it prevents spam. If I want to tell you something, without the entire world reading what I have to say, then I can do that. Many of you are thinking: "but Stefan, I can do that over IM and email!" to which I have to reply: "true, but if I'm already in Twitter so it would be a pain for me to switch applications when I just have something very simple to tell you."
Twitter has hashtags so that I can tag posts by including "#Nokia" in my tweet and now whenever you do a search for "#Nokia" you can see a list of tweets with the same tag. A bit useless in some cases since spammers take advantage of it to sell their merchandise, but in some cases brilliant since you can follow an event or company with little to no hassle.
Twitter also has the ability to favorite a Tweet, something you can do in Jaiku with Jaikungfu, but Jaikungfu only works on the one or two machines you own that have that extension installed. Favoriting is built into the Twitter API.
It pretty much stops there however. I'm not surprised the top tier Twitter users are on FriendFeed. The conversations you have on Twitter usually last one to two replies, but after that you simply switch to another medium out of sheer frustration. FriendFeed fixed this and since FriendFeed was built by a bunch of people out of the West Coast, who used to work for Google, it was picked up by the Twitter elite out of San Francisco.
Jaiku, like FriendFeed, allows you to post a comment that is longer than 140 characters, which is a necessity if you're going to have a deep, meaningful and intellectually fulfilling conversation.
Jaiku, like FriendFeed, allows you to create rooms where you and other users of the service can discuss a certain topic.
FriendFeed, unlike Jaiku, has never been down or at least I never heard of it being down.
In my 9 days on Twitter I've met 4 interesting people for drinks, read articles that I have not seen on Jaiku, helped numerous people when it came to recommending a Nokia or an application for their Nokia, found out about breaking news before my RSS reader picked it up, and got to know the personal side of people who my only previous interactions with them was reading their blogs.
I can not say Twitter is inferior to Jaiku, nor can I say Twitter is a better service. Like all social tools on the internet there is no right and wrong way to use them and you get as much out of the services you invest in them.
Jaiku can sometimes be annoying. I do not have the ability to block people. I do not have the ability to unsubscribe to a conversation and that has stopped me from contributing to many conversations since I know that my "river of Jaikus" will be filled with useless banter from people who I don't really care about, talking about something that I no longer care about.
I can now see why Twitter is powerful and if they enabled threaded conversations then I can see a major portion of the people reading this moving over. The 140 character limitation is frustrating, but it forces you to be concise. I'm still getting used to that to be honest. No more long winded answers, no more detailed answers sprinkled with multiple links.
I'll answer any questions you have and while I can say I hope we can talk about the differences in these networks civilly, my past experiences indicate this is going to turn into a swearing competition.
I'm @s_constantine on twitter by the way. Apologies for any spelling or grammar mistakes, I made a promise to myself and @dst that I would get this out by 17:00 so I rushed since I need to be somewhere in 7 minutes and will be late! =P
1: the cause for finding interesting articles was a direct effect of following interesting people in various fields. people in the EU still don't blog as much as people in the US and chances are that if you blog in the US you also have a Twitter account too. the cause for meeting new people was how i found out about people like @map here on Jaiku, i was simply following, in real time, people asking questions about Helsinki and then met up with interesting people by helping them out.
2: ummm, friendfeed is still too small. i jump on social networks rather late, i'll wait until a year after the month when 90% of the articles on tech crunch mention friend feed. right now that ratio is at about 15% hehe
3: no, i post so infrequently on Jaiku now that people should be able to find this with no problem.
i don't care about injecting my thoughts into the world wide web, i'm busy enough trying to get people in Nokia to pay attention to what i have to say. i have an internal blog at Nokia, i didn't mention it until now. no i will not talk about what i write there so please, no one should even bother asking. that being said, i think between twitter and jaiku people have enough information coming out of me to get an idea about what i'm into and where i stand on many topics.
@constantine: fantastic read, thanks for that. I've been trying to get down with twitter as much as possible but find one main hurdle: The default web-UI is trash. It's an absolute mess. All the interesting things that can be done with Twitter, all the main microbloggers, everyone uses third-party applications like tweetdeck to make posts and follow etc. However, from work, I cannot install any programs, everything net-wise I want to do has to be done through IE6. This is a huge limiting factor and one of the reasons I like Jaiku, the UI is simple and clean, and threaded conversations remind me of the hey-days of forum posting. Is there a way to modify the default web-UI of Twitter?
@samikki exactly, when you think of Twitter as nothing but an API that many services can build on top of then you see why it has become so popular to so many people. the front end you put on the API greatly determines the experience you're going to have with the service.
@tankstar i would just talk to your admin. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR app that doesn't even touch your hard disk.
Leaving that aside, I agree with 80% of what you say here.
The only thing that keeps coming back to me is:
As you say, its the tools and how you use them, so if thats the case, the majority of twitter users (and there are alot of them) don't want to actually talk/converse on Twitter.
They only want to say random things. Or is that just the people that I see there?
Thanks @constantine, that was one of the best Jaiku posts ever. I didn't "get" Twitter immediately and gave up. It seems my approach - trying to use plain Twitter.com - was all wrong.
I can only draw the conclusion that it is not at all sure that usability or completeness of features win in the marketplace but openness -- whether of interfaces or source -- is the platform on which you can rally peopl around. We like to build and extend.
In fact this is the Beta vs VHS all over again. Or in terms of social software, Simpy et al vs Delicious. Originally Delicious didn't hav proper bookmark indexing/search but it still prevailed due to its well-documented APIs. Similarly FB won over MySpace.
25 comments so far
Agreed. Now where's that report on your week with twitter?
10 months ago by dst
going to go downstairs to get some breakfast and then start writing it, have to be somewhere at 15:00, but i think i can pull it off before 17:00 today
10 months ago by constantine
Looking forward to it.
10 months ago by dst
For one week I forced myself to defect from Jaiku and to not only join Twitter, but to use the service actively. The reasons for this little experiment are numerous, with some of them being quite personal, but my main motivations was the recent lack of reliability that Jaiku has been experiencing and sheer curiosity to understand why Twitter is so popular in the first place.
Twitter was a service I constantly made fun of due to the misguided assumptions that conversations seemed impossible to maintain, the people using the service were predominantly based out of the West Coast of the USA, the UI was horrible and overly simplistic, and I still had fond memories of how unreliable Twitter was last year and the year before that.
What I discovered after about 9 days of using Twitter is that the service is powerful for a variety of different reasons and while it is not perfect, neither is Jaiku.
Twitter has an API that actually works and because of that a rich ecosystem of third party applications was built around the seemingly banal concept of sending 140 character messages. I can count the number of times I used twitter.com on one hand. Twitpic allows me to instantly share photos, Dabr allows me to have a rich mobile UI while on the go, TweetDeck enables me to have a comprehensive dashboard to the Twitter experience and various bloggers I know are using tools to have their RSS feeds published directly into their Twitter feed.
None of this worked right in Jaiku or it was too hard to setup since you had to provide an API key and that method of authentication had such a terrible user experience that only highly competent technical users took advantage. Twitter has confirmed that they're working on including OAuth support so at some point in the future you no longer have to give your credentials to third party services.
The biggest advantage that Twitter has compared to Jaiku, and this can not be underestimated, is the rich real time search capabilities.
Jaiku, which is now owned by Google, ironically has no search engine. Using TweetDeck I can follow, in real time, what people are saying about a particular keyboard. I'm tracking what all of Twitter has to say about Nokia, Helsinki and the Palm Pre. If you post a tweet asking what the temperature is in Helsinki or that your Nokia is broken, then I see it pop up in TweetDeck mere milliseconds after you hit enter and can interact with you.
That is powerful. That is addicting.
Twitter has direct messaging. It only works if I'm following you and you're following me, which is brilliant since it prevents spam. If I want to tell you something, without the entire world reading what I have to say, then I can do that. Many of you are thinking: "but Stefan, I can do that over IM and email!" to which I have to reply: "true, but if I'm already in Twitter so it would be a pain for me to switch applications when I just have something very simple to tell you."
Twitter has hashtags so that I can tag posts by including "#Nokia" in my tweet and now whenever you do a search for "#Nokia" you can see a list of tweets with the same tag. A bit useless in some cases since spammers take advantage of it to sell their merchandise, but in some cases brilliant since you can follow an event or company with little to no hassle.
Twitter also has the ability to favorite a Tweet, something you can do in Jaiku with Jaikungfu, but Jaikungfu only works on the one or two machines you own that have that extension installed. Favoriting is built into the Twitter API.
It pretty much stops there however. I'm not surprised the top tier Twitter users are on FriendFeed. The conversations you have on Twitter usually last one to two replies, but after that you simply switch to another medium out of sheer frustration. FriendFeed fixed this and since FriendFeed was built by a bunch of people out of the West Coast, who used to work for Google, it was picked up by the Twitter elite out of San Francisco.
Jaiku, like FriendFeed, allows you to post a comment that is longer than 140 characters, which is a necessity if you're going to have a deep, meaningful and intellectually fulfilling conversation.
Jaiku, like FriendFeed, allows you to create rooms where you and other users of the service can discuss a certain topic.
FriendFeed, unlike Jaiku, has never been down or at least I never heard of it being down.
In my 9 days on Twitter I've met 4 interesting people for drinks, read articles that I have not seen on Jaiku, helped numerous people when it came to recommending a Nokia or an application for their Nokia, found out about breaking news before my RSS reader picked it up, and got to know the personal side of people who my only previous interactions with them was reading their blogs.
I can not say Twitter is inferior to Jaiku, nor can I say Twitter is a better service. Like all social tools on the internet there is no right and wrong way to use them and you get as much out of the services you invest in them.
Jaiku can sometimes be annoying. I do not have the ability to block people. I do not have the ability to unsubscribe to a conversation and that has stopped me from contributing to many conversations since I know that my "river of Jaikus" will be filled with useless banter from people who I don't really care about, talking about something that I no longer care about.
I can now see why Twitter is powerful and if they enabled threaded conversations then I can see a major portion of the people reading this moving over. The 140 character limitation is frustrating, but it forces you to be concise. I'm still getting used to that to be honest. No more long winded answers, no more detailed answers sprinkled with multiple links.
I'll answer any questions you have and while I can say I hope we can talk about the differences in these networks civilly, my past experiences indicate this is going to turn into a swearing competition.
I'm @s_constantine on twitter by the way. Apologies for any spelling or grammar mistakes, I made a promise to myself and @dst that I would get this out by 17:00 so I rushed since I need to be somewhere in 7 minutes and will be late! =P
10 months ago by constantine
@constantine THAT MUST HAVE BEEN THE BIGGEST COMMENT I'VE EVER SEEN ON #GWIBBER lol
10 months ago by BUGabundo
Most definitely.
10 months ago by Bishop
me too :) but a great post nevertheless. I don't see 140 character limitation helping in being concise but the rest is good stuff.
10 months ago by tabrez
Nope, not the longest one, but it is the longest one that made sense.
10 months ago by arjw
Interesting read. Got to consider that real-time search thingie. I've been on FriendFeed for ages, but haven't basically used it at all.
10 months ago by dst
@constantine: nice analysis and style. you should set up a personal blog and put it there too.. (if you haven't already)
10 months ago by afr
that video sucks....
10 months ago by BUGabundo
nice summary, couple of questions;
what was the cause of "good effects" during the 9 days of twitter (meetups, articles etc)
are you planning on doing a similar experiment for FriendFeed?
are you going to post this on the original thread as well? ;)
10 months ago by ymb
1: the cause for finding interesting articles was a direct effect of following interesting people in various fields. people in the EU still don't blog as much as people in the US and chances are that if you blog in the US you also have a Twitter account too. the cause for meeting new people was how i found out about people like @map here on Jaiku, i was simply following, in real time, people asking questions about Helsinki and then met up with interesting people by helping them out.
2: ummm, friendfeed is still too small. i jump on social networks rather late, i'll wait until a year after the month when 90% of the articles on tech crunch mention friend feed. right now that ratio is at about 15% hehe
3: no, i post so infrequently on Jaiku now that people should be able to find this with no problem.
10 months ago by constantine
@afr: i'll blog again when i'm fired from Nokia or something, i signed some hard core NDAs and i need to stay below the radar.
10 months ago by constantine
don't you still own holyinternetbatman.com? I think you should set that up.
10 months ago by rcadden
i don't care about injecting my thoughts into the world wide web, i'm busy enough trying to get people in Nokia to pay attention to what i have to say. i have an internal blog at Nokia, i didn't mention it until now. no i will not talk about what i write there so please, no one should even bother asking. that being said, i think between twitter and jaiku people have enough information coming out of me to get an idea about what i'm into and where i stand on many topics.
10 months ago by constantine
Great analysis and somewhat answers my curiousity about what is it that people see in twitter. So it's the tools and how you use them.
10 months ago by samikki
@constantine: fantastic read, thanks for that. I've been trying to get down with twitter as much as possible but find one main hurdle: The default web-UI is trash. It's an absolute mess. All the interesting things that can be done with Twitter, all the main microbloggers, everyone uses third-party applications like tweetdeck to make posts and follow etc. However, from work, I cannot install any programs, everything net-wise I want to do has to be done through IE6. This is a huge limiting factor and one of the reasons I like Jaiku, the UI is simple and clean, and threaded conversations remind me of the hey-days of forum posting. Is there a way to modify the default web-UI of Twitter?
10 months ago by tankstar
@samikki exactly, when you think of Twitter as nothing but an API that many services can build on top of then you see why it has become so popular to so many people. the front end you put on the API greatly determines the experience you're going to have with the service.
@tankstar i would just talk to your admin. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR app that doesn't even touch your hard disk.
10 months ago by constantine
@constantine: Tweetdeck with search is fantastic way to keep up in real time want people are tweeting about Nokia. I use it too.
10 months ago by Jussi
@constantine and you don't even look like OPK ;)
Leaving that aside, I agree with 80% of what you say here.
The only thing that keeps coming back to me is:
As you say, its the tools and how you use them, so if thats the case, the majority of twitter users (and there are alot of them) don't want to actually talk/converse on Twitter.
They only want to say random things. Or is that just the people that I see there?
Its chalk and cheese, I agree.
10 months ago by runningwithbulls
Thanks @constantine, that was one of the best Jaiku posts ever. I didn't "get" Twitter immediately and gave up. It seems my approach - trying to use plain Twitter.com - was all wrong.
10 months ago by mandrl
Thank you Stefan for the legwork, that was an excellent piece indeed.
10 months ago by jkniiv
I can only draw the conclusion that it is not at all sure that usability or completeness of features win in the marketplace but openness -- whether of interfaces or source -- is the platform on which you can rally peopl around. We like to build and extend.
10 months ago by jkniiv
In fact this is the Beta vs VHS all over again. Or in terms of social software, Simpy et al vs Delicious. Originally Delicious didn't hav proper bookmark indexing/search but it still prevailed due to its well-documented APIs. Similarly FB won over MySpace.
10 months ago by jkniiv