Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now –which got really worse in the last couple of days–, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.
Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.
I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.
But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:
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Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);
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Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;
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Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);
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Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;
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Stability, stability, stability;
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Speed (but only after stability);
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Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.
More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.