Hurley's World

I've been trying out a fair number of social networking tools lately and besides Facebook, I find my self using Jaiku and Pownce quite a bit. They both offer similar features, the ability to send a short message to your friends. However there are features unique to each one that makes them completely separate tools. Pownce focuses much more the social aspect of the site, you are able to make friends, group them, and share messages, links and files with just the people and groups you specify or with the whole world. Jaiku on the other hand seems to be a bit more of an aggregator at the moment. Unlike Pownce, I can add all sorts of RSS feeds to my Jaiku account and anyone watching my jaiku feed will get them.

One of the biggest difference between them is how the envision groups. For Pownce, the user groups their friends. In Jaiku, a user creates a group and other users can decide to add that group as a contact. The nice thing about the way Jaiku implements this is that the individual can decide that they are tired of getting updates from a contact and remove themselves from that portion of the contact's feed. For example, this blog often focuses on one of three topics, fun things I've found, technology posts, and genealogical research I've done. In Jaiku, I can keep everyone who cares about those topics up-to-date but creating three groups, hurleyit.fun, hurleyit.technology, and hurleyit.genealogy. Users can decide to join any or all of those groups and if they get tired of one, they can leave the group. If I wanted to do the same thing in Pownce, the user would have to befriend me, I would have to accept their friendship, I would have to categorize them according to the type of information they want, and I would have to handle unsub requests. In some ways it's like the difference between RSS feeds and email mailing lists.

Don't get me wrong, I really like both tools. But, like all tools, they are really good at specific things and ok at others. If you would like to befriend me on either, follow these links: Jaiku Account and Pownce Account.