jaiku

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 … Read more

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).

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

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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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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:

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to … Read more