Jaiku

Yammer, the 2008 Techcrunch50 competition winner, is the newest entry in a growing pool of internal (or “enterprise”) microblogging applications. We’re working on a side-by-side comparison of the many entrants to that realm of microblogging and hope to share it soon.

But what about the many “public” microblogging tools? Which tool is best in which situation? Here’s a brief comparison of five established applications and the situations where they perform at their best.

The applications that we’re examining in this article are (with unique monthly users from August 2008 by Compete):

Twitter – 2.6 million
Pownce -160,000
Jaiku – 100,000
Identi.ca – 60,000
Plurk – 250,000

TWITTER

Twitter is the most famous microblogging tool. It has gotten mainstream press coverage in newspapers, BusinessWeek, and other mass media outlets. Recently CNN’s Rick Sanchez started using Twitter. Many of the US Presidential candidates have had a Twitter presence for months. Creative types like Wil Wheaton, Warren Ellis, John Tesh, John Cleese, and Henry Rollins also have a Twitter presence.

Twitter’s strengths are its large user base and massive collection of third-party applications that extend the basic Web interface with more powerful functionality for searching, automating microblogging entries, and organizing the user interface. Twitter is designed to work with instant messaging (IM), E-Mail, and mobile phones using SMS messaging. Twitter’s DM (Direct Messaging) capabilities, which you use to send private messages, are also popular.

Twitter’s reliability, once a sore point, has improved greatly. The 140 character limitation can be frustrating, as is the lack of threaded conversations. There’s also the impact of the “river of noise” phenomenon that builds as you follow more Twitter users. If you follow hundreds or thousands of Twitter users it becomes easier to miss interesting or important posts as they drown in a raging torrent of posts.

Twitter is effectively the benchmark for other microblogging services due to the size of its userbase, the large number of supportive third-party applications, and its simple but effective functionality. It is capable of handling many microblogging needs. You can’t go wrong by having a Twitter presence, even if you intend to use other microblogging services.

POWNCE

For months Twitter’s main competitor was Pownce. Pownce launched on June 27, 2007, but only emerged from invitation-only beta on January 22, 2008. On the surface, Pownce has many features in common with Twitter and its competitors, but it has a few strengths of its own.

Pownce allows you to build lists of friends and followers and send both public and private messages, just like Twitter. One of Pownce’s biggest strengths is its ability to transfer large files between users. The pro version of Pownce can send files up to 250 MB; the free version has a limit of 100MB. In addition, Pownce uses integrated event scheduling that’s similar to Facebook’s event functionality. Links are very easy to publish using Pownce. Its private message system is very similar to Twitter’s Direct Messages. Pownce also allows threaded replies and the ability to rate the quality of other people’s posts. In fact, in many ways Pownce is more powerful than Twitter.

Pownce never caught on the way that Twitter did, possibly due to a later exit from invitation-only beta. It only added mobile messaging functionality in December 2007. However, its additional features give it an advantage over other competitors.

JAIKU

Then there’s Jaiku, acquired by Google in 2007. Jaiku has more in common with services like Snurl and FriendFeed than Twitter, as Jaiku has lifestreaming capability. It allows you to import and display virtually all of your activity that publishes an RSS feed. It does not support private messaging, but it does have channels, which allow you to create places where a limited number of people can read messages.

Jaiku only switched to unlimited public invitations in late August 2008, which effectively kept user growth at a very slow pace. The acquisition of Jaiku by Google and recent reengineering to use the Google App Engine may be the key to a promising future if the search engine giant continues to make improvements.

IDENTI.CA

Identi.ca, on the other hand, is possibly the most basic application of the five reviewed in this article. The most remarkable thing about Identi.ca is that it’s created using Laconica, an open source application. Anyone can download and install their own instance of Laconica for internal microblogging. Now that the popular Twitter desktop client Twhirl can interface with private installations of Laconica, this becomes a more attractive “enterprise” or internal collaboration tool.

This also means that people can take the Laconica source, create their own copies of it, and add to it. This makes Identi.ca feel like a prototype: a hint of things to come. An Identi.ca end user might not see the potential of this platform unless people start coding some really amazing things with the Laconica source.

Identi.ca has the smallest userbase of these five public tools. It lacks a direct or private messaging feature like Jaiku does and it is bound by the 140 character limit. Identi.ca does have a clean and simple interface, and it’s popular with several influencers who are pushing for more interoperability and standards in microblogging. If you’re looking to use a simple microblogging solution in a quieter part of the Web, or if you want to extend it on your own, Identi.ca might appeal to you.

PLURK

Our final service, Plurk, is different than the other services and so it deserves some special consideration. The other four offer streams of updates in reverse chronological order like blogs do. Plurk uses a unique timeline feature which lists the newest entries to the left and the oldest entries off to the right. You can choose views that show only your “plurks” (Plurk microblog entries which work within the 140 character limit restriction); those of you and your friends; and all plurks in the system. The web page looks like a series of swim lanes full of colored bars that represent plurks.

Plurk has a somewhat playful, fun feel. You can arrange your friends and followers into cliques, similar to mailing lists. You accumulate Karma points through being active on the website. Karma gives you access to different kinds of emoticons; consequently, you lose Karma through inactivity. There’s a few different views of the Plurk webpage that you can toggle between but they all have a bit of a cartoonish feel.

One thing that Plurk does VERY well is the ability to cluster comments around each plurk. This definitely works better than Identi.ca, Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce because it allows you to track a conversation similar to the way that FriendFeed works. Plurk users are very loyal to the service; they include both casual and professional users.

Will all of these applications eventually become interoperable via standards, the way email did, or by aggregation in applications like Twhirl, the way Adium and Trillian pull IM accounts together? We expect so. Laura has been talking about this for a while – that you will be able to follow your Pownce friends in Twitter and subscribe to a Jaiku user without leaving your own tool of choice.

For now, each microblogging application has its own strengths, weaknesses and capabilities. Knowing them helps companies and individuals can use these applications to their best advantage. Currently, Twitter has the most substantial audience, set of user data and opinions and “off-platform” benefits for commercial use, but companies should be aware of the other applications for specific uses. In the comments, tell us what you think of the various tools and what each is best for.

The TouchBase Blog will feature case studies of companies using these tools to their advantage, to give you ideas on what you should try. Stay tuned! Contact us to submit your company’s story.

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