Five reasons why Google's Jaiku is more boring than Twitter
The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned "lifecasting" service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.
According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:
- "Working"
- "Home"
- "Work
- "Lunch"
- "Sleeping"
Extremely mundane stuff, not exactly the kind of content that would attract tons of new users to the service.
Your first question might be: Why did they study Jaiku and not Twitter, a perceptibly larger service capable of a much larger data set? One word: Finnish. Since the study was conducted in Helsinki, the same city where Jaiku was founded, the fit is natural.
The userbase of Jaiku has not been publicly disclosed, but the site's traffic versus Twitter's is pitiful at best. Compete.com says that Twitter had 23.5 million unique visitors during the month of August while Jaiku had only 36,610.
Furthermore, the Institute's study found that most of the traffic on Google's version of Twitter is driven by "a small supercore of the Jaiku population," which receives over 50% of the site's comments.
The question remains: Why did Google even buy Jaiku? In 2007, the MIT Technology Review took the Jaiku purchase as a signal of the eventual "Google Phone". However, the microblog was not ported over to an Android app at the operating system's launch, and still hasn't been.
Instead, Google moved Jaiku to its hosted development environment Google App Engine and open-sourced its development. The service's SMS integration was discontinued in June in the US, and was replaced with a mobile Web site.
While even Twitter, the most successful microblogging service by a country mile, suffered from poor engagement with new users, Jaiku managed to earn the reputation for being even less user friendly.
Now it's got a study backed by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology that says its content is boring.