Month: April 2007

Twitter VS Jaiku

Michael Grove

When people talk about the number of fans Leo Laporte of TWiT has you don’t really comprehend the numbers until he posts something like this and the majority of his ‘TWiT Army’ decideds to follow suit.

Late last night I watched this effect first hand as people read Leo’s post and created Jaiku accounts, I watched as the Jaiku developers scrambled for their notebooks to make changes to cater for this mass mobilisation to their network. Jaiku wasn’t ready for this, but they managed, and they still seem to be going fine.

Now for the comparisson.

– Twitter is fast, and allows for multiple notification options (IM, web and Mobile), currently Jaiku only offers email notifications, but seems just as fast.
– A debatable difference, but I prefer the look of Jaiku, twitter has always seemed half done to me.
– Comments are definitely done better in Jaiku, although just as confusing as twitter when reading the public timeline / post list.
– I currently prefer the twitter badges for my blog, people are able to view more than just one of my posts from twitter. Jaiku allows only one.
– Jaiku offers icons to go along with your posts; this is a neat little feature to add some emphasis to some of my posts.
– Currently there are more desktop utilities for twitter.
– There is no way to view how many followers I have in Jaiku, yes this prevents follower envy (something that has formed in twitter) but having this feature for private viewing only may be a good idea for the Jaiku developers to add.
– The feeds feature in Jaiku is great, I can even add twitter feeds, so if I want to carry on viewing what my non-moving friends are doing on twitter, I add the feed and viola – I get the tweets.

Conclusion:
I believe that twitter has a large enough fan base to maintain afloat, this wont kill it (yet?), and those movers that are sceptical of Jaiku because of missing feature will have their doubts quelled when Jaiku releases similar tools. I think this move by Leo fans has been huge for any site to take, (losing or gaining) and the next couple of weeks will see if there is a clear winner, or a begrudging tie.

“Hey you! Stop that!”

Michael Grove

Would this work here, in a busy SA street?

The UK is adding loud speakers to its public camera system to allow the watching controllers to tell people to stop misbehaving. I think the first few times would scare the person into stopping, but what if they don’t understand English? Or what if the person breaking the law ignores it, send out the flying squad?

This 500 000 UK pound project will see many more cameras with speaker attachments in the UK, lets hope it’s money well spent.
 

EMI Removes DRM

Michael Grove

If this story had been released yesterday I would have thought it was an April Fools joke.

Today, Apple and EMI announced higher quality, DRM FREE music available for download from iTunes. (DRM music will still be available from EMI, but only in lower quality formats)

This has got to be the biggest step towards a better managed digital music era than any other to date, I can picture Tom, Molly and Veronica jumping for joy, mores the pity South Africa still can’t use the iTunes store.

Weddings (No Fool)

Michael Grove

A year of weddings it seems…

So far my life has had very few weddings, I have attended my parents church wedding (they were married by court originally), an uncles and a best friends. So for those of you counting I have attended 3 in my 26 years on this earth.

Now within 30 days I will be attending three more. Last night was the first, a good friend and co-workers. (all the best Briggsie 🙂 ) The next will be one of my fianceés extended family, and then in two weeks time will be another good friends big day. When it rains, it pours.

And to think it’s less than 5 months until my very own wedding.

Paperless office? Not with Gmail.

Michael Grove

Goggle Mail has released Gmail paper, a button on your emails that you to request a paper copy of the document from Goggle. Google prints the document (with adverts printed on the back of the paper to accommodate costs) and posts the documents to you.

So all those people that miss paper in today’s modern e-mail driven paperless office can get a whole pile of paper documents to file – or to crumple up and throw in the bin.
Interesting concept and they say it’s safe for the environment.

More details on Google’s new system here

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Of course this is most problably an April fools joke, but I like the idea 🙂