(Originally posted over on my Disruptive Telephony blog... but I thought it made sense here as well.)
I have not really written about Jaiku here at all... I have been meaning to explore it a bit more, but just haven't had the time. What limited time I have had lately has been more focused on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and the evolving mashups of all of those.
But Ken Camp has been writing and advocating Jaiku, and is starting a series of posts with his one today: "Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 1" Ken is going to talk more about the new client for Nokia S60 phones. But this part of his first post is perhaps more revealing:
First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a used can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.
Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is apprach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective.
I agree with Ken that this type of "lifestream aggregation" represents a direction in which social networking is evolving. The challenge, I think, really comes back to where you do that aggregation. Jaiku would like to be your aggregator. So would Twitter (which can bring in RSS feeds through sites like Twitterfeed.com). And so indeed would Facebook which now includes an RSS application as part of its platform.
So which do you choose?
All are, to varying degrees, walled gardens of some sort. Ken can't follow my status updates because I primarily use Twitter. Alec Saunders does most all his updates within Facebook. We do need to have some kind of common aggregator. We need to tear down the walls so that we don't wind up in isolated islands of communication.
But in the meantime, if you want to read about how pretty and nice it is inside of the walled garden of Jaiku, head on over to Ken's post to read more. This is Part 1, with the others to follow soon thereafter, I would expect.
