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.