A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages.
Curiously, the Finnish institute chose to examine the also-ran microblogging platform Jaiku. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."
"Microblogging works because of the total control users have over their postings, but it is a hobby that seems to require a significant investment of time which many cannot afford," the Institute said in a statement.
Jaiku is now a shadow of its former self, some two years after it was acquired by Google. According to the site's About page, it's "maintained by volunteer Google engineers on their spare time," after the Web giant decided at the start of the year that a half-dozen products including Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Google Video weren't contributing to its brand or bottom line. In March, the service was moved to Google's App Engine. The company also open sourced its code base, putting the future of the service "in developer hands."
As valuable as the Institute's finding might be to Jaiku users, Twitter is the dominating force in the microblogging space. The Institute didn't analyze tweets, making the study less applicable to the entire population of microblog users.
That said, earlier this year the Oxford University Press studied 1.5 million tweets to see which words were found most frequently on the popular service. Aside from obvious words like "the," "it," "and," and "to," the organization found that "work", one of the top words on Jaiku, is also a top term on Twitter. It was included in over 26,000 tweets the organization analyzed and was one of the most-used terms on the site. One of the least-used terms Oxford found in its study was "running." It was included in just 3,195 of the 1.5 million tweets it researched.
The study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology will be available in an upcoming issue of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal.
I got in a whirl about Twhirl the other day because it let me post to multiple microblogging services at once. Today I've been checking out a service called Ping.fm which ups the ante by letting you blanket Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and Facebook with the same short form message.
All you need to do is link up each account (it only works with one from each) and send said 140 character message to a special e-mail address provided by Ping.fm. Your message will be sent to all the networks by default, but there are also small shortcut codes called "triggers" that will let you choose to only send your message to that specific service.
In addition to e-mail there's an instant-messenger bot that works with AOL. I'm also hoping to see a short code that will make it as easy to post to via SMS as Twitter is since some phones don't let you send SMS to an e-mail address.
I do worry sometimes about the idea of blasting out the same message to several services at once. As I've said before, each community brings with it different levels of interaction, and distancing yourself from that means you're likely to miss other people's replies. Mixing something like this up with a service like SocialThing or FriendFeed could be a solution, but let's not forget about core services we're using in the first place.
Ping.fm is currently in private beta although if you use the invite code "Webware" on this signup page you'll get in.
Update: Webware reader Molzymcd notes hooking up your Twitter account (and potentially others) sends out a one-time message that advertises that you're using the service. If you're not okay with this, don't sign up. Better yet--let the creators know.
Update 2: Alright, we've rounded out some more updates. There are 250 of these, so get em while they're hot. Just enter "Webware" as the invite code.
[via Mashable and Download Squad]
Ping.fm lets you send a microblogging message to five different services at the same time through a special e-mail address.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
I'm a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.
To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.
The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you're Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you'd like (I successfully added six).
Twhirl lets you add in your Pownce and Jaiku accounts to cross-post your Twitter messages to each service on the fly.
(Credit: CNET Networks)As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It's also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn't have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.
The one crucial thing that's missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it's nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it's a one-way street. It's also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.
Twhirl's been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you'll need the latest version of Adobe' AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.
Related: The many flavors of Twitter
... Read more
One of the more interesting voice-to-text companies out there is SpinVox, which has been kicking around for the last four years. This week they've added a really cool new feature that adds voice-to-text support for some popular "microblogging" networks like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, as well as status update and wall support for Facebook. Once you've registered your logins with the service, you can call a single telephone number and post to all of them at once, or pick which ones you want your message to go to.
The service is aimed at people who don't want to spend time typing out messages on their mobile handset or spend money on an SMS message. It's also worth noting this is one of the easier ways to use Pownce from your phone, short of going through its unofficial iPhone application.
What interests me more than this is Spinvox's blogging component called Spin-my-Blog. Like the social networking integration, you can set up your personal blog to work with the voice-to-text service. Calling your special number and leaving a message will automatically convert to a written blog post that will auto-publish to your blog. Blog owners can also publish their special number to their blog page, letting their users create their own posts. I asked if the company was working on a system similar to this to handle user comments on blog posts, and the answer is that it's "in development."
Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.
RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's mouths when it hit the scene at this spring's South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Governor wrote in his Twitter feed (appropriately enough) that he thought Yahoo was ".9 probability" (i.e. very likely) to purchase the Bay Area start-up.
When CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland got curious and asked Governor to elaborate, the analyst responded: "(I) plucked it out of thin air," he said in an e-mail. "Google and Yahoo are in dueling acquisition mode, and Yahoo is almost certain to respond. Especially since Twitter has begun to use a footer on SMS messages it sends out--which could of course be used as a microbillboard."
The potential parent company, naturally, isn't talking. "We don't discuss speculation," a Yahoo spokeswoman said when asked about the possibility.
Governor also surmised via Twitter that Jaiku, or the technology behind it, may eventually become part of the much-rumored Google mobile operating system. Blogger Robert Scoble, however, said that "the more troubling thing is that Google acquires companies and then we never hear about these companies again. Will that happen to Jaiku? I hope not."
CNET News.com's Elinor Mills and Stephen Shankland contributed to this story.
Facebook has several layers of functionality that make it worth using, but my favorite is the once-controversial news feed. Why? I simply don't have time to check each of my friend's profiles for what's new, and the feed does a pretty great job at that without all the legwork or annoying e-mail notifications. FriendFeed is a new service that takes the idea of a news feed and extends it beyond the social network into other social services you're a part of. There are more than 20 to pick and choose from, including social news services like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, along with microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
Keep track of all the feeds for all your friends with FriendFeed.
(Credit: CNET Networks)By adding all these services to your FriendFeed, you're essentially creating another social networking profile--but this is a little different. It's almost like a digital identity, or your very own "about" page of services you use. Others can then easily subscribe to your FriendFeed and get the benefit of all of your online activity in one place. Likewise you can subscribe to theirs with one click, and track all the online activity they've made publicly available.
So what's the big deal about this service? It's really not a new idea--other services like Readr, Spokeo, Jaiku (which is incidentally one of the included feeds) let you do this with all sorts of social feeds, and 8hands, which we looked at back in late April, does it on your desktop with IM to boot. There's also the recently launched Plaxo Pulse (review), which adds some contact management into the mix as well. So to answer my original question, the most exciting part is the group of folks behind it, which consists of four ex-Google employees who have worked on big projects like Google Maps, Groups, and Gmail. That and it's super simple to use--you just need to copy and paste a few URLs, and plug in your username.
For widget junkies, there are two ways to extend your FriendFeed master feed to other platforms, including a Facebook app (which beats installing apps for each social service), along with a Javascript version you can embed on any old blog or Web site.
The service is in private beta with plans to open up to everyone in the "next month or so."
Add Jaiku@jaiku.com to your Jabber buddies to get updates via IM.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Jaiku (more), the microblogging service that does more than Twitter but has fewer users, just added IM capability. You can now update your Jaiku account from an IM client, and get updates sent to you on IM from your Jaiku network as well.
This feature rounds out the access system for Jaiku. The service already has a robust mobile phone app for Series 60 phones, and it has a Web site optimized for mobile devices. The Jaiku IM interface works on Jabber, so LiveJournal and Google users can access it. Users of other IM networks (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft), might want to look into a multi-IM client like Trillian (only the paid version supports Jabber) or the Web service Meebo (more).
Update your status, and keep an eye on your buddies with Jaiku's freshly updated Nokia S60 app.
(Credit: Jaiku)Jaiku's got a freshly updated mobile app for owners of Nokia handsets running the latest version of the S60 OS. Once installed, it lets you keep track of your Jaiku buddies without having to resort to your phone's Web browser. The real pull however, is presence, which lets you see what your Jaiku friends are up to live--or go back and take a look at their previous messages using a feature they call "stream view." With the new presence system, if you see one of your friends online, you can begin a conversation with them, turning the app into a near-instant messaging client.
Another big change users of Jaiku's previous mobile iteration are going to notice is a new option to swap back and forth between an "always on" mode, and one that checks in only when you re-enter the app, which cuts down on battery drain. There's also an improved way to share your presence with your friends, including your geographical location, which the app will pull up based on what cell phone towers you're connected to (handy for non-GPS phones).
Still missing is a way to access the app via Wi-Fi, which you can get around if you visit the slightly less featured mobile version of the site on your phone's browser. The Jaiku team is planning on adding this functionality in the next release.
Featured on this week's Real Deal podcast: Twitter alternatives. Since our episode on Twitter back in May, a lot has changed in the world of nanoblogs. Twitter is not the only fruit. There's Jaiku and Pownce, both good competitors to Twitter. There's Facebook, which already has a "status" feature. And there are services like Profilactic and Twitterfeed for aggregating your status feeds (Jaiku is also a good aggregator). In just 15 minutes, Tom and I run through the options.
Here's the stream:
There's more to life than tweeting.
If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums .
Real Deal subscription links:
- For RSS readers: http://www.cnet.com/i/pod/realdeal.xml
- iTunes: Subscribe
Pownce (review), the new nanoblogging service that doubles as a person-to-person file transfer product, is often compared to Twitter. Both products enable you to "nanoblog" quick updates on what you're doing. But the products have fundamental and important differences, and if you're curious about which one you should be using, you need to know about them. (Jaiku is also an important product in this space; more on it further down.)
Stick with your friends
The big issue: It has nothing do to with design or features. It's the community. Your community. If you want to use one of these services, use the one your friends are using. Trying to keep up with multiple nanoblog services will drive you insane (I'm tracking several this morning as I write this story, and trying to keep up is nearly destroying my ability to focus). Trying to get friends who are established on one network to join you on a new one is a fool's errand. You might get some to come with you, but there's no doubt that you'll leave others behind.
Any post in Pownce can become a standalone discussion. Very cool.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In Web 2.0 circles, Twitter is the nanoblog service to use. I admit that I say that partly because I have hundreds of followers there and don't want to leave them for another service. Pownce is growing rapidly as people get invitations and try it out, but everyone who leaves Twitter for Pownce is going to be leaving friends behind.
On the other hand, if you're starting from zero, give Pownce a serious look, especially if you're thinking of using it in a work setting. With Pownce, you can easily set up a group of contacts, and use the service to keep co-workers up to date on what you're doing as well as the latest versions of documents you're working on. Also in Pownce, replies to particular nanoblog entries are easily tracked in their own threads, on their own pages. If something you write starts a discussion, it's much easier to keep track of what people are saying than it is on Twitter. Again, this is a great feature for business users.
Tradeoffs
The practical downside to Pownce, right now, is its lack of support for mobile devices. Twitter works nicely on mobile Web browsers, and also via SMS and IM if you care to use it that way. Twitter is also more open to developers, and there are several services that offer alternative (non-Web-based) interfaces to it. I use Twitteroo. Pownce has a decent desktop client on its own, though.
Pownce and Twitter are not your only options for nanoblogging. Jaiku is also worth exploring. It has several of Pownce's cool features, like discussion tracking, as well as a nice mobile client for Nokia phones. It's also a very useful aggregator of nanoblog feeds. If you feed it the RSS feeds that Pownce and Twitter publish, you can have your own universal nanoblog. For example, here's mine: rafe.jaiku.com. It takes everything I write in Twitter, Pownce, and Webware, as well as my Flickr photos, and puts it all in one place. It doesn't update frequently enough, but it's a powerful service.
And you can't talk about nanoblogging without taking Facebook into account. Facebook lets you track what your friends are doing on your own Facebook page, and thanks to Facebook's new open platform, other services (including Twitter and Pownce) can now update your Facebook feed. There's a good chance Facebook will become even more useful as a social hub as the teams making other apps tweak them to work even better on the Facebook service.
Final note: Dear Meebo people, Can you please add these nanoblog systems to your Web-based instant message aggregator service? Thanks.
Related links: Mashable has a nice rundown of eight "miniblog" services. See also our Newbie's Guide to Twitter.
