I’ve wanted to write something up about Twitter for quite a while, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say. I’ve boiled it down to a few very simple statements: “Hot, trendy websites fail to hold one’s interest if they don’t serve any purpose” and “Hot, trendy websites begin to fall off of everyone’s radar if they fail performance-wise” (the “Friendster effect”). I tried Twitter for a week or two, but didn’t see the point — this stuff is less interesting and so less useful than anything I’ve come across on the Internet for a long, long time. It was a visceral reaction for me, I felt disgust and sadness at the lameness of it all. Is this what the Internet has come to? Posting hourly updates on whether or not you’re doing your laundry? Telling everyone what you had for lunch via your mobile? Who cares about this kind of minutiae?

That said, I can see the utility in using something like Twitter as a clearinghouse for a variety of one’s regularly-updated RSS feeds. I’ve got too many of them out there (Flickr, Netflix, last.fm, Library Thing, etc.) and no simple way to let my throngs of fans follow my every Internet footprint. So, here’s where Jaiku comes in.

I initially read about Jaiku from Leo Laporte‘s blog a few weeks ago, when he bailed from Twitter. I love Leo, but didn’t understand why he found Twitter so alluring and why he was hyping it up so much — apparently, after a few weeks of the hype, everyone else wondered if it was related to his TWiT network, which it ain’t, so he jumped to Jaiku. Jaiku’s pretty much a “Twitter plus” — it allows you to document that you’re clipping your toenails at 1am if you want to, plus gives you the ability to incorporate your other RSS feeds into one “master feed.” This is why I’m on board for the next wave of trendy update websites.

Here is my Jaiku page, and here is my grand mal RSS feed (both are now linked on the front page of this weblog). It currently includes whatever I choose to put for my Jaiku status (probably not much), plus it gets updated whenever a new Flickr photo gets posted, whenever I listen to music and it gets noted by last.fm, whenever I update that I got a new book to Library Thing, whenever I add new movies to my Netflix queue, etc. Now, this is the kind of ridiculous minutiae I can get behind!

I’m only partially joking, I honestly think this makes more sense for how I interact on the Internet and what I value about it. I am not the type of person who is going to read blog after blog to see what kind of mood someone is in, but I am the kind of person who wants to know what music people are listening to, see the latest photos they’ve decided to share with the world, find good new movies to check out, and so on. Jaiku lets me do that.

Who knows how long I’ll do this, but since it mainly runs on autopilot, I’m guessing this will be an extended experiment this time. I’m going to Jaiku! And, what the hell, maybe I will start jotting down ridiculous minutiae — I’ll start with regularly listing what I eat, just to keep me on a reasonable diet via the risk of public embarrassment.