Jaiku and Pownce

First and foremost, Google now owns Jaiku… or they’ve joined forces, or merged … no… Google bought them, what am I thinking? What they’ll do with Jaiku? Who knows, but considering the small interesting features of Jaiku, I can see potential for it moving in a very useful direction.

For me? Jaiku isn’t interacted with directly… or through the human interface for that matter. I have a series of RSS feeds pumping updates to it on a regular basis. My flickr feed, Twitter feed, and a few blog feeds… hell I think the only way my Jaiku account gets updates is if I update one of my other sites (like this one). Regardless, the interface is that of what you can expect with a micro-blogger. I prefer Twitter’s friendly atmosphere over Jaiku’s simple application. The saving grace for Jaiku is the ability to have it read from a feed, otherwise it would be about as useless as Pownce, which has two saving features…Just found a lame feature of Jaiku, by the way - not to talk too much bad - if you run out of charactes in your post? It doesn’t stop you from typing… it just disables the POST button, leaving you guessing what could have just gone wrong. Interesting interface feature.

Onto Pownce… what is there to say about Pownce? I’ll concentrate on the two key features: File Sharing and Social Network Sharing.

First: File Sharing, you can send up to 10MB (or 100MB with a PRO account) files within each post, which makes Pownce a virtual file sharing program for potentially being able to transfer copyrighted materials, and I can see that being a problem, if Pownce ever takes off. It has come in handy quite often - but moreover, the other things you can “send” are links, videos and images. I have to admit the displays for these features are presented very well… I’m neglecting the “who” of these sites deliberately, because honestly these sites are simply Twitter copy-cats, with some added bonus features - meaning, it takes the same kind of personality to interact with these… Even though it is obvious to me that Twitter is the better, more popular, and more active of the three.

Oh and secondly, Pownce allows for a neat little bit where you can add all your social networking links to your profile… granted you still can’t actually make your profile your own color scheme (on either Jaiku [fully] ]or Pownce [at all]) but being able to add your social networks to it for a little extra centralized knowledge for your ‘friends’ on the site, that’s kind of neat.

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