Twitter is dead, long live Jaiku

Wow, a bunch of stuff happened while I was playing Guitar Hero 2 this afternoon.

Due to problems with the TWiT <> Twitter branding issue, about 12 hours ago Leo Laporte moved from our favourite new plaything to a service I’d never heard of called Jaiku. Its a relatively similar product but with a bit more flexibility (and complexity). All its missing the ability to have ‘tweets/jaikus’ sms’d to you (although you can sms jaikus to the service).

Read Leo’s blog post here.

So what is going to happen to Twitter now? Leo and several other TWiTs are clearly a driving force in the Twitter revolution. I’m on there because Leo and Justine talked about it on Mac Break Weekly and I’m sure many people are in the same boat. We came for the TWiT Army but stayed for our cute, addictive and simple little web app.

So I’ve done the bandwagon thing and nabbed lenier.jaiku.com. I added my blog feed (something you cant and wouldnt want to do in Twitter) and added Leo and such. But at first glance, the damn thing looks way too complicated. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the ease of Twitter and its progeny; Twitterific, but this new thing has comments and feed importing and flickr and… its just too much.

The only hard thing about Twitter is explaining to people what it is. Leo’s been on Jaiku for 12 hours and his timeline is already so needlessly complicated, with all the trackbacks and comments and little icons and feeds, that I’m pretty turned off by it. The feature rich atmosphere is confusing and uncomfortable from the get go.

Gimme a few days with it. But initially, I’m staying with Twitter and keeping one eye on Jaiku. In the end, I loves me some Web 2.0.

Doesnt everybody?