Wednesday, July 18, 2007

To Jaiku, or not to Jaiku?

Hmmm. I've been looking at Jaiku for a few days now, and am torn whether or not I should join.
I originally saw the idea of mini-blogs with Twitter, and with the recent addition of the Twitter Web Badge for Blogger, I was tempted to use their service. However, I dismissed the idea because I can always just email in little status thingies into my blog from my phone anyway, and it doesn't cost me a cent (whereas I have to send an international SMS for Twitter to work). But since that dismissal, I keep seeing Jaiku around.
Jaiku have a S60 3rd Edition client. This means it will run on my phone and communicate with Jaiku using my phone's Internet connection, rather than international SMS. This also means there is a more powerful interface - it will update my location automatically, display who is online etc, etc all from my phone. Plus Jaiku links with things like del.icio.us and other feeds - so that's cool. So it seems a cool little service.
But I keep thinking... does it do anything that I can't do already?
Is it useful to separate little status messages from my normal Blog?
Do I really want people to know where I am?
Another question is whether the client disables itself when I leave the broadband zone - which would be expensive/annoying if it doesn't.
So. I will decide soon.

With Web 2.0 there seems to be a lot of doubling up of services. Another example of this is Facebook. I already have MySpace, and I'm barely using that anymore anyway (is that what happens when you get a girlfriend?), so will I still care enough about Facebook in 4 months time to justify signing up now.
Plus, I like my Blog - I don't want/need a MySpace Blog, nor a Facebook one - and unless Jaiku integrates well with my existing one, I doubt I will want/need one of theirs, either.
So many questions. I am overwhelmed by Web 2.0

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