Scaling Twitter. Jaiku is FaceBook, Twitter is MySpace

If you use Twitter, you hate these cats as much as I do.

The broadcast short messaging/blogging service known as Twitter is borked. At least that’s what everyone’s saying today and in case you don’t believe me, check out the search results for “twitter + borked” on Twitterment.

The quality and availability of their website (and access to those much beloved APIs that make software like Twitterific possible) has been absolutely awful, leading dozens of my own Twitter buddies to start accounts on the competing Jaiku service in the past 24 hours.

Same But Different.

Twitter’s approach is to give users a bare bones feature set. Twitter embraces anarchy and chaos by not having advanced features like commenting and aggregation of users 3rd party content.

I think Twitter’s jungle-like experience is analogous to MySpace and what has happened to it. MySpace, at least for me, is a disaster and difficult to use, but I use it anyway because everyone is there and it gets the bare minimum accomplished.

Jaiku on the other hand offers a wide array of advanced features and attempts to help users structure the would-be chaos in a social service.

Personally, I love the fact that I can aggregate my Tweets from Twitter, my photos from Flickr, my blog posts, and even what I’m listening to in iTunes (thanks to Last.fm’s RSS Feed) — all into my Jaiku feed for others to see.

Jaiku also reminds me of FaceBook because there’s less people using it, probably because there has not been a child stalking piece on Dateline about FaceBook yet. While there may be less users, clearly Jaiku is more robust and easier on the eyes in day-to-day use.

One of the cool features yet to be completely released to the public are Jaiku channels. These channels will provide something analogous to IRC.

I spoke to Jyri Engeström of Jaiku today about adding a Second Life channel and it looks like it’s already up! Check it out here. Jyri stressed that the channels are very much in Alpha and don’t have many features available… yet.

Scaling Python vs. Rails

Jaiku does have the benefit of not having to deal with the same level of users on their system. It’s yet to be known how their system will handle scalability if everyone from Twitter jumps ship.

The Twitter website runs on a framework called Ruby on Rails. Many developers are keeping a watchful eye on how the folks behind the service scale it up because Rails has apparently not been deployed on a large social network site on the scale of Twitter.

The smaller, more feature-oriented Jaiku service runs on Python. From the few developers I have talked to, Python is possibly more scalable and flexible than Ruby. I have no idea because I got out of the web development business prior to the coming-of-age for these framework systems.

You can hear Alex Payne talk about scaling Twitter on the 5 Questions Podcast and there might possibly be some audio from Blain Cook’s presentation at SD Forum a couple of weeks ago.

Tweetering on Change.

Many people just can’t let Twitter go. For those that can’t stand to leave, many are opting to add their Twitter feed to their Jaiku account. This way they can use both services.

Will Twitter’s momentum of adoption keep Jaiku in 2nd place? Will users abandon Twitter altogether after seeing too many cute cats with screwdrivers on the home page? Only time will tell…