The new microblogging services, Jaiku and Twitter, are aiming to avoid the bad relationships between their older brothers – the instant messaging services that never talked to one another.
AOL’s instant messenger, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger used their own proprietary protocols for instant messaging, so a user on one could not chat with a member of another, meaning users often having all three clients open on their desktops.
Jabber, an open-source client, Meebo, a browser-based one, and a belated link-up between Yahoo and Microsoft have helped to improve the situation, but the microbloggers hope to nail a lack of interoperability in its infancy.
"We’re getting into interoperating pretty quickly," says Jyri Engestrom, the Finnish co-founder of Jaiku.
"Our challenge is to federate our services so it doesn’t matter if you are on one or the other. We are using the same underlying protocol, which is Java, so it’s technically possible."
Linking the two would profit both, he says, growing the market and moving lifestreaming into the mainstream.
Not surprisingly, a fan has already made a mashup called Twitku that lets users post to Twitter, Jaiku or both at the same time.
This should help those wondering whether to switch from one to another. Jaiku’s servers crashed in April when the biggest Twitterer, Leo Laporte, moved over and the mega-blogger Robert Scoble now appears on both.
Jyri says Jaiku is seen as having a better interface and a richer feature set than Twitter. Its mobile capabilities are particularly impressive. A presence feature identifies the nearest cell, to which users are adding street locations. So Jyri’s visit to our San Francisco office showed him as being at Grant and Post Street in his Jaiku profile, accurate to within a few feet.
As a former Nokia senior product manager, he ‘s pleased that Nokia is now offering a client version of Jaiku on 300 handsets, joining clients for the "Jaikuberry", Mac OS X and several others created by ordinary users.
Channels, introduced last week, are the latest innovation. Identified by a # mark, they allow discussions on particular topics among users.
Petteri Koponen, Jaiku’s other co-founder, defines lifestreaming as giving users "social peripheral vision – you know what your friends are doing but you don’t have to react."
Jaiku expects to make money by offering mobile operators localised versions of the service and hopes to figure out how to inject simple relevant text ads into outgoing messages.
It does not see its service replacing instant messaging: "We think it’s going to co-exist and you’ll be able to click to connect to IM or Skype or a regular phone call with someone," says Jyri.
