Making The Switch From Twitter to Jaiku

Too bad. They had a great start and they were becoming more and more popular every day.

I wonder how much their choice of RoR is contributing to their problems.

I’m actually a loyal twitter user and won’t be leaving. The downtime is more charming than anything else. This isn’t exactly a mission critical app.

My social life is mission critical though. My friends, my colleagues. I have more conversation on micro-blogging services like this than with a blog. Jaiku has the features that Twitter needs and they are adding functionality.

So, I can converse with my friends and colleagues; I can follow a thread of *coversation* as well as see their various blog/webfeeds.

That leads to business. And personally, that’s mission critical. I can’t afford to be a fanboy, is all.

I like both … and all the others … and so I’m waiting for http://www.brabblr.com

Jaiku has also some instability problems, with much less traffic. Seems a more robust product, but it is not clear it would be able to cope with the Twitter traffic levels.

Jaiku sucks because logins have to be 4 letters minimum. WTF. I’m Ozh, period.

Today was the first time that i had tried using twitter and i must say it was far from impressive. Even just trying to sign up there was more than a few of that damn cat. As for trying to get third party clients to work - blah forget it.

Don’t believe the hype. Many of Jaiku’s functions, like a del.icio.us feed, don’t work, comments get stretched far away from the original topic which gets really out of hand if everyone of your friends has something to say. I’m just going to run a private server with a forum on it. It’s the only way!

twitter being down a lot shows growth. As Mike says, it’s not mission critical to have twitter. It’s almost like saying Truemors would be mission critical! hahaha…

Rex

omg lol RoR isn’t threadsafe - wtf!!!!

but seriously, RoR scales like crap. probably the source of their problems.

Ozh, we suck less now - as an exclusive favorite for you, we changed the minimum to 3 letters. Be fast, there are many Ozhs out there

Doug, at least I’m seeing del.icio.us and the other feeds working, and we haven’t received complaints on “many of Jaiku functions that don’t work” We recently added some hardware, which enables us to fetch feeds more frequently.

In addition, people seem to like comments a lot, since they enable conversations. We’ve already promised to add comment cascading, so that long threads would not dominate the feeds. You can always unscubscribe such a thread, though.

Jaiku sux if you update from your cellular phone. I gave them an entire 2 months to get me fixed and just got tired of working with them on the issue and switched back to twitter.

I wonder what this says for RoR scalability compared to PHP?

@Ozh (#7) and I’m “Ia” but hardly anyone accepts two-letter usernames, much less domain names, these days. That’s why I had to come up with a longer username when I had to switch to GMail.

@Petteri (#12), I hope you got that as a hint as well! Haha.

I use Jaiku on my Nokia N73 on a daily basis. Excellent app, one of the slickest mobile interfaces I’ve seen. Juhu is great for laptop access. I also made a tiny contribution to the Jaiku dev community ( a ruby-based blog badge): http://eric.wahlforss.com/2007.....celocation

I saw red wid dat putty tat!

I sent queries and no one’s answering WHY. All they have to do is post something. Today, I read at MyBlogLog this note: “Twitter is down.” Now, that’s better. The thing is, I can log-in at Twitter now but still no updates at MBL.

I had my Jaiku account last March [if I'm not mistaken] upon an invite. I updated it yesterday. I miss Twitter friends. I like Jaiku as well. There are many features. I won’t be totally transferring house, I’m keeping both.

Thanks for this post. At least I know what happened.

Another great tool is JaikuBerry for posting and reading from the BlackBerry.

http://www.movethemarkets.com/richard/jaikuberry/

The fact that the downtime is constant is testament to the fact that the demand hasn’t let up. I only see things getting brighter for Twitter and RoRails in general as they’ll probably have something to contribute back.

However, that is only if it’s short term and they share information more transparently. I don’t think people will be all that turned off by short-term downtime as long as they see genuine progress. But yeah, it’s sucked a bit in the last couple days. (lost a couple twits)

I’m sticking with Twitter as well. It’s far slicker, despite the problems.

This seems to be a natural progression. I remember Blogger in its earlier days when they had significant problems and projects like Movable Type and Wordpress kicked off.. it wouldn’t surprise me if they all help each other to grow, as the blog systems did, by increasing awareness of the medium. As with blogs, within time there’ll be a system that lets you view messages from each platform in one place, and even post to multiple accounts on different platforms as the same time.. and then we’ll be where we are with blogs (or even IM) now.

Well Jaiku seems to be pretty ok but I don’t think that name will ever catch-up. People love to say twitter more than Jaiku.

Oh, and I just started a service that plots blog visitors on a map. This is for Windows Live Spaces only as it uses Windows Live gadgets and Windows Local Maps… (A mash-up?)

Regards…

I guess we don’t know Catigen for the photo

“proper” lolcat speak could have been

“Oh Hai Again, I’m in your servers becoming your default web page”

Click my name for the my “The Cat Killed Twitter” video commentary.

I agree with mike that it is not mission critical tho his partner says, “Seriously, I’m in your corner… but the down time is really impacting my ability to get my job done!”

And I disagree about moving to another service because, moving sucks.

I’m not going anywhere. Twitter it is!

The question about mission critical-ness is a bit of a non-issue.

The importance of the network, however, is.

If you decide to move from Twitter to *whatever*, unless your network moves with you, it still pays to stay and put up with Twitter.

After all, there’s nothing special about the technology; its easily clonable as a number of non-English Twitter clones can attest to. The magic is in getting your friends on the network so that they can hear about what your cat’s breath smells like — err, or, other important things.

Cheers
t @ dji

yes, indeed. let’s have Twitter users decamp en masse to Jaiku and immediately undermine any claim it has to being a more stable platform! I’m w/ Arrington…downtime is part of the charm of a fast-growing and non-essential startup.

Considering Twitter is not mission critical, considering it is a “for fun” thing…I am not terribly annoyed by downtime.

Do you really think Jaiku won’t have the same issues if/when large numbers of people move over to them? They will run into the exact same slow downs, downtimes, and problems.

Does anyone know why Google seems to be sitting on Dodgeball and not trying to grow it? It is a really good idea with great features yet they rarely update it or expand the markets that it covers. I am tired of being in “Other City”.

The maintenance page is about to get a Google PR..

I will keep using it to watch popular people talk and keep trying to plug my site.

Seems to be an equal match (if your disreguard how many people already use twitter)

- also - I cant understand how a company with as much traction as twitter - can’t get it right and keep up ..

There`s no service that merge both twiter & jaiku? Cause is obvious that population is the apeal.

I have not been able to get Jaiku to send me an activation code for my phone for about 2 months. I like the service but I routinely update Twitter from my Treo and I could only switch completely to Jaiku if I could do the same.

These other services will experience the same issues… Let’s not be naive. Every great service experiences growing pains and Twitter will solve these just as del.icio.us did. Assuming another service has a better service b/c its running fine with far fewer users is a bad assumption.

Like many, I’m not on Twitter because of the app itself, but because many of my friends are. It’s community first, technology second, like many others.

Hmm, the popular one has scalability problems.

The one that’s not popular doesn’t seem to have scalability problems at all.

Maybe if everyone switches to Jaiku, Twitter’s reliability problems will go away!

uncovered http://freeearth.poly9.com/_twittervision/ (my charming new ’screensaver’) through delicious by way of feedmashr
such third party experiments make me wonder if this kind of dev community support will boost twitter pasts the bumps in the road

When it comes down to it, RoR is good for small websites with not a lot of traffic or your personal blogs; PHP and Python are the leaders in terms of speed and high-traffic websites. Using RoR will increase your overall costs (and thus profits) because it takes 5x the amount of servers to scale in comparison to PHP/Python.

This is make or break time for Twitter and the RoR community.

As an entrenched RoR dev, I really hope we don’t see this going the way of Friendster.

If you’ve been following the saga from the tech side, the latest word from the Twitter camp was that the scaling issues had mostly been pushed to the database level. (read: blame MySQL or their setup or whatever, not RoR) But the problem could be different these days.

Re: the community…most of the comments above are 100% right - it’s about the community/network Twitter’s built, not the tech.

I’m sure you can now, if not in a few weeks/months, buy a PHP twitter clone script for $99 on scriptlance or wherever.

I am sticking with Twitter, esp since most of my connections are on it. As Michael said, not mission critical, and Jaiku does way more than I need.

I am frustrated with Twitter, yes, but I choose to stay out of a sense of loyalty. I fear, however, that many of my most valued contacts are migrating. I now use TwitKu.com to monitor both, but I wish TwitKu had an analogue of Twitterrific for desktop use.

Tim: Are you just making those numbers up wholesale or are they based on something?

RoR has many distinct advantages, and yes, some scaling challenges. But Twitter’s performance problems are particularly difficult because it is not just a Web app but a full-scale communications service, pinged ferociously and automatically. Twitter’s business requirements make it more difficult to use tried-and-true mechanisms like page caching to handle performance issues.

This bird don’t tweet.

http://www.vibeagent.com/landi.....ont-tweet/

This site should not be called techcrunch, it should be called fluffballs. The content, writing, and depth of this site is pathetic.

Twitter is going through the normal growing pains of any site that suddenly attracts a ton of traffic. Yes, Ruby on Rails is new and hasn’t been field tested like J2EE, etc but developers and management alike tend to miss the point on scalability issues. There isn’t just 1 solution to scalability problems, every high volume website has their own set of unique challenges to overcome.

My favorite example, MySpace. MySpace is first built with Cold Fusion and then migrated to ASP/IIS and now .NET. But seriously, when has anyone thought that Cold Fusion or even Microsoft technology can scale for that matter. In fact, that has been one of the industry knock on Microsoft technology that they don’t scale like J2EE. Well MySpace has proven them naysayers wrong.

There is a great article here on how MySpace dealt with their scalability issues.
http://www.baselinemag.com/art.....921,00.asp

The challenge in scalability is to identify bottlenecks and then adapting the architecture / technology to handle it. It isn’t just a language/framework issue like many inexperienced developers like to claim. Plus there is absolutely no business in using Mongrel (which Twitter is using) as the web server for high volume sites, use Apache or lighttpd with fastcgi, etc.

I’ve been fairly frustrated by Twitter recently.

The IM bot works sporadically at best, and the server downtime doesn’t help.

I’m an early adopter among my friends, and they’re much less likely than I am to put up with such frustrations. I’ll have to stop recommending Twitter until they get these issues sorted out.

Hopefully they will….

I like Twitter a lot. I also see that cat a lot but the downtime never seems to last for more than a few minutes since I joined (granted only a few weeks). What I don’t like about it is that I really don’t know anybody on it - it’s all tech industry men (with only a few that I know). It’s really cool for making plans with people and talking with friends because everybody can see what you’re doing as a group and respond. It’d be cool for finding out what clubs are going off here while out with friends, since you could hit many of them at once versus one at a time with traditional texting.

I can think of a lot of ways Twitter could become huge just by landing in the right circles. We’ll see!

If you’d be so kind as to say what you don’t like about the jay-q interface, it’d help make it better. Customizable colors and resizable are coming, but more people seem to like the talk bubbles over resizing. Other complaints?

You failed to mention Leo Laporte converted over from Twitter because of copyright issues.

His company name is TWiT.

R.I.P. RubyonRails.

Saying RoR could scale was like saying Macs were as fast as PCs BEFORE they switched to Intel.

And let’s not forget that Twit’s isn’t that big an app/website.

(full disclosure: I’m doing some consulting work for Jaiku, as of very recently)

1) CONVERSATIONS: To me the big difference in the services is the ability to have threaded conversations through Jaiku; to me, this turns it from simple “situation awareness” about my social network, which is nice, into a new situation-aware collaboration tool, which is beginning to make it a mission critical app for me… I expect there to be a large b2b market…

2) STABILITY: I expect both services to be sufficiently stable and accessible (US shortcode, IM, other interfaces) soon so as to remove Server Catz as an issue or point of differentiation. But perhaps Jaiku is for dog lovers…

3) FUN EVENT: Come meet the Jaiku founders fresh of the flight from Finland at the Jaiku reception the night before Supernova– details at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/190604/

At least Jaiku doesn’t have downtime? That’s cuz it doens’t have any users! There’s no way to predict how it would handle Twitter’s userbase and load.

Personally I have no interest in Twitter, but their growth rate is phenomenal and interesting. As a programmer, I as well think RoR is their main problem. As if the site is even that complicated… what’s the point of using something like RoR for such a simple site that does ONE THING?

Why can’t we get an app for Twitter that looks as good as Jaikaroo does? All the Twitter Windows-based desktop apps look terrible.

I still maintain that Jaiku 1. has a terrible name, it’s just not catchy, and 2. would have the exact same issues as Twitter if they actually had any users.

Actually, this article made me give Jaiku a second chance and today I switched (while still keeping an eye on Twitter). The main gripe I had with Jaiku is that I couldn’t update it from my Blackbery (I have no SMS on my phone), but now there’s JaikuBerry and it works great.

While I do know some people on Twitter, I have never met any of them in person, so I don’t feel too attached to Twitter (even though I’m sure I’ll keep following them on Twitter)

I have noticed that the Jaiku rss feed comes accross way better in my Tumblr blog (http://w8in.tumblr.com) than the Twitter feed (either built-in in Tumblr or rss).
I also like the built-in location and icon options in Jaiku better. I’ve noticed I place more importance on my Tweet or Jaiku ending up on my Tumble-blog rather than on Twitter.com or Jaiku.com.

Maybe I’m an oddball Twitterer or Jaiku-er and I do not represent the average user.

I am sure Twitter will rebound soon. They must be adding servers like crazy.

My $0.02 on scaling:

Scaling to handle the traffic Twitter does is not easy in any language. At these levels, what counts is your skill of generally scaling a Web app (base design, caching, DB, session sharing, optimizing web server/OS/etc configurations etc) rather than the particular language you chose to work with.

PHP has the advantage of significantly better scaling out of the box - ie, you’ll get further trafficwise before requiring special scaling expertise - but, again, at the traffic levels Twitter deals with, you’ll need scaling expertise no matter which environment you chose.

(FWIW, I’m no Rails fanboy - did a lot more PHP than RoR so far - and frankly still don’t see the point of Twitter at all ;))

I have done comparisons on both and I prefer Jauku for several reasons. I really like their commenting feature and found it much more engaging. I will continue to use both services.

To be fair to Twitter, the scaling issues can be a nightmare and I am sure they are trying very hard to resolve this.

@Tim: “Using RoR will increase your overall costs (and thus profits) because it takes 5x the amount of servers to scale in comparison to PHP/Python.”

‘5x’ the servers to scale with RoR than PHP eh? Could you point out where you got that number from (benchmarks links?).

Oh wait–let me guess– you pulled that number out of your ass.