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 …

Background
Following the news and ongoing discussions about Twitter lately has been like watching a car accident repeated over and over again. You try to turn away and ignore the carnage, but the sheer horror of it is too much to avoid.
There have been the multiple outages – now a Twitter standard – a lost database followed by another similar occurrence, with Twitter announcing:
“We just lost a database about 5 minutes ago and this has severely impacted the site.
We’re working on recovering from this now.”
followed by
“We’re experiencing a database problem …