Twitter or Jaiku?

So Pownce is not quite doing it for me. The event item is hard to distinguish from a standard note and so that kills its use for replacing event planning from Facebook. Plus I discovered yesterday that Google Calendar can use contact groups as defined in Gmail so that makes using Google Calendar for planning events easy.

That means I need to try to fill in my microblogging fix. The leading services are Twitter and Jaiku. I decideed to look at both and compare them based on:

1. iPhone support: Easy to check in my browser on how it looks and measure overall size of the login page.
2. OS X support: I want a desktop or dashboard app, damn it!
3. SMS support: I have a phone with a fancy flip-out keyboard and this would be a perfect use for it.
4. IM support: Can I use GTalk to update my status?
5. General features: Does one offer something I really want over the other?
6. API features: Can I read the API docs and easily figure out how to, from Python, send an update?

Let's start with Twitter. For iPhone support there is their mobile page. According to YSlow the page is 2.6K in size; nice and small for when you have to connect over a crappy cell network. For OS X support there is Twitterrific which is design by the Icon Factory which make purty things. For SMS Twitter has a set of commands to control the service (which are also used with the Google Talk user). They even have a Canadian SMS short code. As for features, Twitter just does status updates, period. And finally, as for the API, it's rather thorough. It's biggest drawback I can see is that it uses HTTP basic authentication which makes it a slight pain, but not horrible.

And now for Jaiku. Their mobile page is 1.7K, a little over 1K smaller than Twitter. For OS X there is the desktop app Juhu. Jaiku does have SMS, but you must message an international number. IM support is forthcoming. As for features, Jaiku does status updates, but you can set an icon as well. There is also an option of adding feeds that go into your status updates which can be handy as some people who have both Twitter and Jaiku accounts have their Twitter feeds aggregate into their Jaiku accounts and then just post from Twitter. As for the API, its not as extensive as Twitter, although they do support XML-RPC (but not XML like Twitter, although Atom or RSS could easily be considered as filling that role) and their authentication is through API keys and not HTTP headers. Plus the docs are just easier to follow.


Anyway, I am going to mull this over and then make a decision at some point in the near future about what service I am going to try.