Leo Laporte Leaving Twitter. Will Jaiku Become Popular?

Leo Laporte announced today he was leaving Twitter. Not because he doesn’t like Twitter–he’s a huge fan, in fact, but apparently, people are confused that his podcast network TWiT and Twitter are somehow related. And, of course, they’re not. To make it perfectly clear, he decided to leave Twitter altogether.

Now Leo is popular enough that any “social networking service” he uses will be swarmed. That’s exactly what happened to Jaiku today, which is what Leo decided to use instead. I sort of experienced this phenomenon firsthand when I decided to start my own FireWall-1 mailing list back in July of 2000 (now called FireWall-1 Gurus). This was back in the day where I was actively helping people with Check Point VPN-1/FireWall-1 and was thus quite popular. Once I announced my intentions to start this community and focus on it exclusively, people followed by the hundreds.

My use of Twitter has had nothing to do with Leo Laporte. In fact, I probably started using it before he did. I have built up my community of “friends” organically over the months–friends that collectively mean more to me than Leo Laporte’s presence, or lack thereof. The loss of Leo isn’t going to deter me from using Twitter, and in fact may help ease some of the growing pains Twitter has been going on.

I might give Jaiku a look now that Leo has settled on it, but quite frankly, I’m already on too many places as it is. Unless Jaiku’s got something Twitter doesn’t and I can easily bring my friends over (or they decide to move), I’m probably going to stay where I’m at.

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This entry was written by PhoneBoy and posted on 6 April 2007 at 11:59 pm and filed under messaging. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Ricky, Jaiku Mobile tries to match your existing contacs. It bases matching to phone number only, so match requires that you Darla has given same number to Jaiku as you have in your phone book. If it fails to match, you can do match manually by trying to open Contact Details of Darla the Jaiku user and match it to Darla the phonebook one.

Crashing when dialing is something we haven’t encountered and we haven’t heard from other people. It can be data or phone model specific issue. It would be great if you can provide more info: Was it S60 2nd ed or 3rd client? Did it happen to all contacts?

2. Teemu on April 9th, 2007 at 2:41 am
I recently gave up Jaiku, which is interesting. I found that the phone client didn’t always work 100% (it would crash when I tried to dial) and it doesn’t go through and “find” contacts you already have. Hence, I had Darla Mack’s contact “Card” on there 2x, and that’s annoying and unacceptable to me.

3. Ricky on April 7th, 2007 at 7:54 am

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By %w(Akita On Rails) - Home on 1 September 2007 at 6:15 pm

Buzz out Loud, agora Mahalo), discutindo sobre isso, acho que no ano passado. Houve discussões no mundo dos podcasts entre Twitter vs Jaiku. Houve até uma polêmica em torno de Leo Laporte migrando doTwitter para Jaiku. Depois Kevin Rose (fundador do excelente Digg) anunciou seu próprio social networking ; Pownce (que comecei a usar recentemente). Assim como John C. Dvorak, eu também não vejo muita graça em twittar. Eu twitto, no máximo, uma vez a cada 2 dias.