Jaiku introduces a concept of a Lifestream or feed that shares your online activity with your friends; such as your recently updated flickr photos, your last.fm music or your mobile location.
. It has recently implemented the ability to create and join channels. You can also aggregate content from feeds from other websites, and they even have little icons which you can add to your posts. Not to mention they support threaded comments.
Unfortunately, as you add more friends and channels to the mix, things get messy and it becomes harder to filter out excess content.
For many, the only problem is a lack of features. There is no support for icons or threaded comments. Twitter also lacks in the style department.
Anytime you decide to enter a post, you select your current mood at the time of writing, and the site keeps track of your mood for you. It’s a feature that fits perfectly for the site and offers an interesting twist.
One benefit of Jaiku is defenetly the fact that you can unscubscribe from feeds within your friend - I for example am never interested in last fm or picture, I can unsubscribe on a per friends basis.
All this said, i still feel there’s a lot of things that can be improved in personal communication space. I don’t particularly like e-mail because it’s not instant, and it limits the size of files you can send. It’s great if you want to send stuff to a lot of people at once. Instant messaging offers instant communication, but sending stuff to more than one person isn’t working all that well (yes, you can switch to chat mode but why do I have to do that every time I want to send a message or a file to more than one person on my friends list). Also, it usually provides no log of your previous messages, or this log is full of omissions (if you use IM at home and at work, for example), and it’s a pain to search it. Finally, there’s web-based personal communication - Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, the last of which fixes many of the problems that IM has, but, well, it’s still not working instantly. Plus, it doesn’t offer support for mobile
Perhaps one of the most obvious differences with, for example Twitter, is the Contact Groups feature. When posting any items to Pownce, you can specify whether to send it to All Contacts, Individuals, or the public timeline - posts are not automatically placed in the public timeline, and unlike Twitter you can specify whether posts are public (or not) on a post-by-post basis. You could, I guess, consider this to be encompassing Direct Messages, Public status updates and everything in between.
In a similar style to Tumblr, it offers you post types: in this case Message, Link, File and Event.
It posts a link and a description. The thing I like about this option is that by specifying an update as a link, instead of just putting it in a 'Message', Pownce's website shows the given URL in a special area, not in-line with the rest of the update, which means that URLs your friends post don't get lost - a nice touch, and keeps the site somewhat less cluttered than Twitter
Up next is the Event option, which is similar to services like Upcoming.org - post your event and people can RSVP accordingly (with more options than simply watching, attending or neither) - b
(I'm not entirely convinced with the 'rating' of posts yet - simply making a post a favourite as per Twitter is enough for me)
