Drew B's take on tech PR

Why Google bought Jaiku over Twitter - and my thoughts (having spent far too long using all three)

News is breaking that the Twitter competitor Jaiku has been snapped up by Google. How cool! the story is starting to spread but we're not told how much Jaiku's gone for. What I think is so good about this deal is it shows what kind of a future might lie in store for this microchunked form of snippet-blogging or lifestreaming and microblogging or open IM / SMS whatever you choose to call it. Anyone who reads the stuff I ramble about knows I'm a big fan. And Jaiku's boss Jyri is a smart cookie and has done some cool presentations on the role of social media as a communications tool. I thinks it's ace that Google now has a app that does this to sit alongside its wiki, blog, reader and all the rest.

I've been on Jaiku about as long as I've been on Twitter. As a PR person I've found both of them massively useful as a networking tool. You a see news break before the papers get it a lot of the time.

The big difference between the two is that Twitter is more open at the reader end where Jaiku is more open at the end where the user sits.

For example you can plug updates from any web feed into Jaiku and it turns them into one message stream. Perfect if you have a buddy list and you want to share your pics (I feed flickr into it), events (upcoming.org), music (maybe last.fm), links from del.icio.us, stuff from Twitter and even your Facebook status updates. It's not possible to do this with Twitter without faffing around with glitchy hacks and third party apps. But Twitter's open ended feeds at the front plug into my IM when Jaiku doesn't, so I found it more useful as a messaging tool and went for Twitter over Jaiku. Relevance-wise, more of my network was on Twitter too, which is the most important than functionality to me at the end of the day.

But I think this is why Google went for Jaiku over Twitter. All the Google apps can work more easily with it at the back end, the Googlejuice will work its wonders on the relevance, network and front end. Marriage made in heaven!

FOWA this week

I visited the web 2.0 conference Future of Web Apps this week. FOWA has always caught my eye when it comes around because of the sheer amount of chatter it creates across the web. It's the one event that draws the genuinely interesting speakers from the industry too, with a lot of the big US names coming over. And because of that, everyone in the media chatters about it too. FOWA becomes London's gathering on the press and business social media ecosystem. I was only able to stop by for an hour, but bumped into companies and industry commentators I've followed for years.

And yet strangely, very few PRs have heard of it.

Other people that went have been uploading their pics to Flickr which you can see here. If you're looking for a video podcast to add to your library, one was recorded live on stage at FOWA by the Diggnation guys. It's on iTunes now. Mike Butcher at Techcrunch told me the audience went a little bit crazy over it...

iPod Touch lands in the UK - a first look

Hooray! My iPod touch arrived this afternoon.

I've only had it about half an hour so all I've rigged up so far is iTunes, a few photos, the web (Gmail, Bloglines and Twitter into my bookmarks) and I've checked out YouTube. So these are just my first impressions.

You have to register the iPod with your iTunes account before you can use the web, but once I had done that it found the wi-fi in nice and quickly. Then the web is easy to use, as is everything on it really. Typically I've not bothered reading the manual yet.

First impression is that is a v.e.r.y sexy little gadget. It's the same dimensions as my BlackBerry, but a fraction of the thickness. the best way I can describe the screen is fun, with all the sliding and stretching that the videos I'd watched promised. I'm going to have to get used to tapping at the screen when I'm using it for email or messaging though. Right now I prefer being able to touch the keys.

Once I've had some more time to get more out of it I'll post a bit more.