I wrote back in September that Jaiku was the ultimate microblogging platform. In the 4 months since then, it’s gone from Microblogging to Lifestreaming, but it’s still the same thing. SocialStream didn’t come about as anticipated, but I’ve tried a bunch of different Lifestreaming/Microblogging web apps since then. Tumblr keeps being brought up as one of the top lifestreaming apps, but the advantage of easily mapping your tumblelog (sp?) to your own domain is immediately counteracted by the fact that you can only import 5 feeds. That’s probably enough for most people, but for those of us like me (how many of us are there anyway?) who have Twitter, Flickr, blog (you’re reading it), Yelp reviews, del.icio.us bookmarks, recent Diggs (or other social news site votes), and recent Halo 3 games, you can’t fit them all. (I could add my Netflix At Home or Queue feed in there, but I haven’t really decided which of those Netflix feeds I want to expose to the public) Anyway, as you can see, there are too many feeds to put into a Tumblr lifestream.
Soup.io lets you add as many feeds as you want, and they make it pretty easy to map your own domain. Buuuuuuuut, neither Soup nor Tumblr let you leave comments on someone else’s Lifestream/Tumblelog/Microblog. Jaiku does. And Jaiku still lets you unsubscribe from friends’ individual feeds. So, if you don’t care when I play Halo 3, or what I digg (not that it happens that often anyway), then you can (still) unsubscribe from those aspects of my Jaiku-ing. And now that Google has purchased Jaiku, you can rest assured that the service will continue (even if no further development is done on it) for what will probably be a long time (in web-relative time).
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the Jaiku feature set integrated into the social activity streams that Google is slowly adding to their suite of applications. At first I thought that the mobile app Jaiku built was the reason Google made the acquisition (and I still think that’s probably part of it, since Google is now launching their own mobile OS), but I can now see that the – shall we say – more advanced lifestreaming features were also an important part of the deal; the ability to unsubscribe from individual feeds probably being at the top of the list there.
While I’m on the subject and rambling away, I think Google/Jaiku made a serious error in shutting down the open sign up process when the purchase was made. I’m sure that day was the most traffic Jaiku had ever seen, and I know that both Twitter and Jaiku were set ablaze with comments on which one people should be using. Google should have capitalized on the momentum to get as many new Jaiku users as possible, and given them the opportunity to see why Jaiku is still the best Lifestreaming platform as well as a great microblogging platform.
