One of the assignments in one of the courses I’m currently taking required us to write a paper comparing two online communities. I decided to take a look at microblogging communities, Twitter and Jaiku, instead of the run-of-the-mill interest forums or social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Besides, I’m on Jaiku too, so I guess it was time to take a deeper look into what made it appealing to me. (Biased? Who’s biased? )

I thought comparing Twitter and Jaiku might be fun too, especially since some have expressed surprise at Google’s choice of microblogging startups, choosing Jaiku over the far more well-trafficked Twitter.

As far as my scope goes though, I wanted to take a look at the features that these services offered and their value to the user. “Success” in my terms meant offering the most benefits to the user and not whether or not those features are responsible for getting the company acquired. I’ll leave that speculation to the pundits.

So.. let’s take a look at how these two services fared against the following criteria

1. Satisfying the basic need

While both Twitter and Jaiku were about evenly matched in terms of means of access, ranging from the web, IM and SMS interfaces, to the availability of an API and the presence of community supported third party apps, I’d have to say Jaiku pulled ahead here thanks to its (unfortunately Nokia S60-only) mobile client.

Quoting Andy Smith from Jaiku during the Hej! 2007 conference [via CitizenMediaWatch]

Social sites should bring its users more beer

And with the mobile client extending the Jaiko-sphere beyond the computer into real life, Jaiku manages to do just that. With that nifty client broadcasting anything from physical location to user status (”available”, “away” or “busy”) to seeking out other Jaikunauts around you, if that isn’t achieving the basic aim of presence streaming, I don’t know what is. (And I bet stalkers love that too! =))

2. More value!

I also took a look at the provision for special interest sub-communities within the main community itself. I took as a basic test the availability of the BBC news stream within each Twitter and Jaiku. In Twitter I found that the BBC news stream was provided by a custom user named “BBC” that other users could follow. In Jaiku, although there was also a user named “bbcone“, that was only one. The rest of the BBC news feeds appeared in Jaiku channels like #BBC or #BBCSports.

In this regard, I find #channels as a more intuitive grouping for users than subscribing to a custom user. It’s just more comfortable thinking that I’m going to join the BBC channel, rather than add BBC as a contact. But maybe that’s just me. Besides, user interaction in a channel is multi-directional. Users can post and respond in a many-to-many fashion, as compared to simply receiving updates from a single user, which is uni-directional. Encouraging more interaction betweens uses is definitely a plus in my book =)

The other feature that I found gave more value to the users was the ability to add additional RSS feeds to your Jaiku stream. Allowing users to integrate other feeds, from say, Flickr, del.icio.us and Last.fm simply serve to better answer the question “what are you doing?” (I’m sorry I had to steal that from Twitter). If your friend is surfing the web and bookmarking sites, you’re gonna see it. And if he’s uploaded a photo of his brand spanking new iPhone, you’re gonna see that too. And yes, you can ask him why he’s still listening to the Spice Girls when he just Jaikued “Megadeth rocks!”. In essence, your buddy doesn’t have to post about doing all that, his feeds will do it for him, brought to you courtesy of Jaiku.

3. More interaction!

As with any community, online or off, interaction and activity is its lifeblood. Without a constant stream of user interaction, a community.. well.. isn’t. In terms of pure activity, well, Twitter definitely wins outright here. Just take a look at Alexa traffic rankings for the sites.

However, I was also looking for factors that encouraged more, and better interaction between users. As such, I took a look at Jaiku’s conversations. Now, allowing conversation threads might not seem to be such an awesome idea at first, but here’s my take. Keeping all the related comments of a conversation together in one thread not only allows current conversation participants to keep track of the conversation - allowing it to span multiple hours, if not days, but also allows new entrants into the conversation since they have a context to follow, instead of some individual post floating out there in the ether. This means that the basic structure of a conversation on Jaiku encourages more participation amongst users, and for longer periods. Sustained conversations then go a long way into establishing and solidifying the community. Howard Rheingold himself has been said to define community as arising when people “carry on … public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.”

Conclusion

In all, it certainly feels as if Jaiku has the feature-set required to build a “successful” community - or at least, according to the criteria defined above. Even though Twitter has more raw traffic, I’m pretty inclined to think that Jaiku has the stuff needed for the long haul? What happens when users get tired of simply posting little messages like for everyone to see? There has to be something more than that, there has to be the community. Surely it’s not all about you and your updates? Whoz in ur stream, readin ur postz?

There’s also a very similar post on Why Jaiku outshines Twitter on Citizen Media Watch. Looks like we share pretty much the same views Lotta! =)