Jaiku – Why did you fail?
I love Jaiku. I didn’t even join Twitter until yesterday. I think Jaiku’s features (mainly threads and channels) are still beating Twitter. In short Jaiku is like an IRC for the grown ups. But still I’m sad. It seems Twitter is winning the whole competition and I really don’t want it to.
API
There is a ton of Twitter applications for iPhone and desktop. Jaiku also has a couple of applications available (+ really cool location based app for Nokia phones (Boo!)). The difference is that Twitter’s API allows these applications to do everything that you can do on Twitter.com site and Jaiku’s API is very restricted/impaired.
Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails and using it really makes it easy to build RESTful API’s. I guess this is one of the reasons why Twitter has such an awesome API and Jaiku doesn’t. It’s logical that API isn’t the first thing on your todo-list when you start building a new service but you should not forget it. Not even when Google buys you.
Design
I kind of liked Jaiku’s design, but now when I’m on Twitter or better yet using the TweetDeck, Jaiku seems like an open source project built by some school kids. I kid, I kid! Twitter is still kicking Jaiku’s ass on the design side.
Invites
Come on! You are losing the battle and you’re still invite only?!?
Business model
Jaiku is strong business wise. First, they probably aren’t running out of money anytime soon being owned by Google. Second, ads are the next big thing in monetization!! Third, Jaiku’s location based and phone profile features pre-installed on Google phones could change everything.
Jaiku, get your shit together – now! You still have a chance.
