Jaiku Desktop Clients
One of the major advantages that Twitter has over its nearest competitors is the prevalence of 3rd party clients. These desktop applications enable you to interact with Twitter without visiting the web interface, and provide far greater functionality than the instant messaging option.
Jaiku is arguably Twitter’s closest competitor for the microblogging crown, and initially I had thought that no such clients were available. I’ve just discovered otherwise, and have been testing two of the available offerings - Jay-Q and Jaikuroo.
Unlike the most popular Twitter clients, which are built upon Adobe’s AIR framework, the Jaiku clients I’ve uncovered so far are based upon the Microsoft .Net platform. It’s unclear at this stage whether the framework difference has resulted in any functionality differences relatively speaking, however aesthetically the AIR clients look far, far nicer.
Tool-set Comparison
Functionality-wise Jaikuroo offers users far more options than Jay-Q.
- Most notably, Jaikuroo offers several different display options including Channel specific, Public, You and Your friends or Your Friends only - Jay-Q by contrast only lets you choose between Public, My Jaikus, and those of your contacts.
- When viewing the channel updates in Jaikuroo, only the updates sent to a specific channel will be displayed in the client
- Jaikuroo also provides options for showing Flickr thumbnails, and Last.FM Artist Thumbnails when included in updates.
- The only thing that Jay-Q seems to offer that Jaikuroo doesn’t is a spell-check option.
- Both let you designate the frequency with which the client checks for updates, as well as colour scheme.
- Both require login via your unique API as opposed to username and password.
Preliminary Thoughts
Despite having only spent about 15 minutes on this evaluation so far, it seems fairly clear that Jaikuroo is the better client of the two. That said, with competition for users in the client realm being what it is, and both clients fairly early on in their existence - Jaikuroo is currently on version 1.3 and Jay-Q on version 0.95 - I wouldn’t be surprised if Jay-Q rolled out similar functionality over time.
Jaiku as a Competitor to Twitter
Given the closed Beta status of Jaiku, it’s not surprising that there are not nearly as many available 3rd party clients as Twitter. However as the Jaiku blog indicated recently (”Making Progress“):
“…contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service.”
It would seem therefore that Jaiku is gathering steam and heading towards a full-scale open launch at some point in the future. And given it’s got the deep pockets and infrastructure of Google to support it you can be fairly certain that they won’t have Twitter-esque outages.
If Jaiku plays their cards right they could be in the exactly the right place to welcome a wave of disgruntled Twitter users into their fold. When that happens I think the market for third party clients will explode and we’ll begin to see some of the same sorts of AIR clients that have become so popular amidst the Twitter crowd.
References:
- “Making Progress” Jaikido Blog, 30 May 2008
- Jaikuroo - http://rareedge.com/jaikuroo/
- Jay-Q - http://jay-q.com/
Screenshots
