Ryan Snyder

Jaiku blew up a couple days ago. Google bought them, and of course, whatever Google touches turns to gold. Or so the story goes.

I'm disgruntled. I thought I had caught a glimpse of someone doing something right on the web. I thought perhaps that I had found a tool that I could consider useful. Alas, I have not.

Over lunch 2 weeks ago, Moxley Stratton, Sam Keen, Mark Wallaert and I were conversing about the idea of quality and how it was severly lacking on the Net. Twitter, for example, is full of noise yet very little of it is important enough for me to actually listen to. I see about 1 valuable post for every 100 that come across my screen.

Jaiku is not much different from Twitter. You can tweet on Jaiku. And you can post little icons with your tweet to add extra meaning to your 140 characters. And you can scrape in your blog, Flickr and Delicious RSS feeds... and your Twitter tweets too. So, I suppose it's a place where you can aggregate every single point of digital communication in your life.

Isn't that what a blog is for?

Yes and no. I already have a blog. I already aggregate all of my feeds through my blog. I'm all set. Where I see it helping others is those who maybe don't have enough skills to put together their own blog or RSS aggregator. It certainly is nice to have all of those points of communication coming into one spot.

But again there's one sticking point for me. Quantity. Not Quality. Jaiku promotes quantity. More posts from more websites. More feeds. More tweets. But I don't need any more noise in my life.

If Jaiku could single out only the most important posts from each of my contacts, then I'd be sold. In other words, show me only the conversations, feeds, links and posts that initiate the most buzz, the most diggs and the most comments, that way I can save time by not having to personally filter out all the noise, that way I can focus on my work and on my physical relationships. Once Jaiku can do that, I'm on board. Until then, it's just another boom box with a busted speaker.