Leo Laporte leaves Twitter for Jaiku
Leo Laporte just reported he’s leaving Twitter to go to competitor Jaiku instead. Here’s what he posted:
“I’ve asked Ev to delete my Twitter account. I’m concerned about confusion with TWiT. I’m moving to Jaiku: account is ChiefTWiT. CU there!”
and
“I should never have trademarked TWiT. Curse you Ev. Couldn’t you have called this Odeoer or something?”
I’ll follow the details and post more on my Twitter account.
UPDATE: we’re having dinner with Lisa Stone and Chris Carfi and Chris says Leo is the “Twitter quitter.” The reason Leo’s leaving Twitter is significant is because Leo kicked off the Twitter hype by talking about Twitter on his show, TWiT (This Week in Tech) about two weeks before SXSW.
UPDATE2: Jaiku is currently down. So, at least they have the same scalability problems that Twitter had three weeks ago.
UPDATE3: more on Leo’s blog about his decision.
UPDATE4: I’m on Jaiku too now at http://scobleizer.jaiku.com/. Personally I like the simplicity of Twitter better. But that might just be me.
Powered By 
April 6th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Stop the world…
April 6th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I’m dying inside.
April 6th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
http://evhead.jaiku.com/
Hmm? The world is turning upside down…
April 6th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
funny, all i get when i go to jaiku.com (which i’d never heard of before, btw) is this:
[mdb2_error: message="MDB2 Error: connect failed" code=-24 mode=return level=notice prefix="" info="connect: [Error message: Too many connections] [Native code: 1040] [Native message: Too many connections] “]
April 6th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Jaiku is down for me.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
yep jaiku is still down here as well… suprising how you mention it and poof lol i could swear i was on it for some reason yesterday and it was ok
April 6th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Has anyone else noticed that Leo’s last few tweets are no longer there? I’m not questioning that they were there (I saw them too) but now they are missing from Leo’s Twitter page.
April 7th, 2007 at 12:27 am
Mike: Leo asked @Ev to remove his Twitter account. So, I’d expect all his Twitters to go away.
Jaiku is lame compared to Twitter. Sorry, any service that doesn’t support a Web interface is lame. If I wanted that I’d just go with Google’s Dodgeball.
I expect a lot of Leo’s fans will follow, but I won’t be one of them. I have enough to deal with just following email and Twitter.
April 7th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Robert, since Twitter is getting all the press lately, I wanted to know what you think of a service I created with a couple of buddies, loopnote.com
It’s not quite as simple as Twitter, but very, very similar. I feel that a lot of the talk on Twitter/Jaiku also applies to loopnote, yet it never gets mentioned anywhere :(
April 7th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Martin: where were you four weeks ago when we were all getting hyped up on Twitter?
April 7th, 2007 at 1:12 am
I guess I was living under a rock ;)
I looked at Twitter when it first came out and thought “hey, they’re doing something very similar, but it’s a little simplistic”. The what are you doing thing seemed strange at the time, but I think I see its appeal now.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:15 am
Hint to marketers: when something is happening and 2,500 people sign up in less than a month (which is what happened to me over on Twitter) you better speak up when the movement is happening. Not four weeks after.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:16 am
Sorry, Martin, but NO ONE has told me about your service. And I have hundreds of thousands of readers per week. The fact that you weren’t here screaming your head off tells me you aren’t very up to date on how markets work in the Web 2.0 world.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:21 am
You’re right, I missed the bus on this one. I went for a little stroll, the bus came out of nowhere at an insane speed, stopped, picked everybody up, and by the time I got back from my stroll it was gone.
Lesson learned.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:31 am
Martin: how could you miss it? Come on, dude, it was in the freaking Wall Street Journal.
Get onto the RSS bus. Learn to use Technorati and Google Blog Search (different than Google) and search for your name, your product name, your company name, your competitor’s names.
Also search Google News for your stuff and your competitor’s stuff.
The hype happened three weeks ago at the Game Developer’s Conference and SXSW.
Coming in three weeks later just ain’t gonna cut it. Sorry.
But, now that you’re here. You gotta figure out how to get some big fish to switch. You just missed your chance with Leo, since he switched from Twitter to Jaiku. I doubt he’d switch again (he really was the start of the Twitter hype too).
So, how you gonna get a few big fish to switch from Twitter to your service?
April 7th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Robert: we were featured on Techcrunch back in December (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/10/new-service-keeps-you-in-the-loop/), so we figured that people had at least heard of our service.
We’ve got some stuff in the works that we hope people will like enough to switch away from Twitter/Jaiku, or even better, use them together with loopnote (yes, it plays nice with others). I can’t give everything away here, but if you want to take it offline I could give you a little more background.
Martin
April 7th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Martin
Many many companies are covered in Techcrunch, only a few of them bubble up to ‘discussion nodes’ like on Techmeme.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Martin: I read everything on TechCrunch, but don’t have time to try everything out. And, since when is talking to Mike the same thing as talking to Scoble?
April 7th, 2007 at 10:15 am
screaming your head off
Hahahahha, yup, Web 2.0 in a nutshell. Presentational layers doing simple tasks, without infrastructual frameworks, screaming until they get funded or bought. Shoot up town, take off with the money, leave town before the Sheriff catches up.
April 7th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Robert,
What I’m finding strange is that Leo’s Twitter page is still up (despite the request to have it taken down) but the two tweets that you quoted in your original post are missing. It goes from a tweet about Fastmail (20 hours ago as of the writing of this comment) to a tweet about his account still being active (5 hours ago).
April 7th, 2007 at 10:41 am
@mike - the explanation was in one of Leo’s earlier tweets also. I remember him saying that when he attempted to delete his Twitter account, the ‘delete’ action only deleted his last post.
I can only speculate that he must have tried to delete the account a few times. And each time he tried, he only managed to delete whatever the latest ‘tweet’ was.
I’m not brave enough to actually try deleting my Twitter account to test my theory, though. LOL.
April 7th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Instead of a bunch of proprietary islands of presence updates, I think an RSS like standard for updates would be better. Jaiku is crash-prone, but at least you can add a twitter feed. I suppose it’s similar to gaim in that regard.
April 7th, 2007 at 10:52 am
This just occurred to me: for those interested in the deleted ‘tweets’, try grabbing the RSS feed for http://twitter.com/leolaporte before the account is deleted.
You’ll find the deleted ‘tweets’ there.
April 7th, 2007 at 11:08 am
[...] a single user. other than that, it’s really very similar to Twitter. according to this post by Robert Scoble, they’re even dealing with the same load-problems (I experienced quite some delay when [...]
April 7th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[...] about how when Leo Laporte switched to Jaiku, he brought his legend of fans and followers with him. According to Scoble, the service went down last night because it couldn’t handle the TWiT Army. This goes to show that you’re [...]
April 7th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
I noticed the very same thing last night and twittered it. Odd right? I did notice that Leo mentioned that when he tried to kill his twitter account it was just deleting his last post, so maybe thats the issue, but it is weird and unsettling.
April 7th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I think these services are a great move forward for the connected minded people… but I wonder, like the Unified Field Theory scientists are trying to crack, I’m guessing whoever creates a UNIFIED MESSAGING THEORY will be onto a winner…
I mean, skype, messenger, twitter, email etc… “one messenging service to rule them all” ?????
April 7th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
My post didn’t come out right. Revised -
From Leo’s blog: “The problem is the name. I wish to heck he’d named it Tweeter, or Tooter, or anything but Twitter. Twitter is so close to TWiT that I’m afraid it’s really confusing.”
Leo has a lot of issues with names, from podcasts/netcasts to Twitter/TWiT. I’ve been using Twitter since December and I can’t say that the association with TWiT has ever crossed my mind. I think he’s truly in over his head about these naming conventions.
I tried Jaiku for all of 2 minutes, and unless it catches on (I hope it doesn’t), I’m sticking to TWiTter. (Oops.)
April 7th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Robert, I’m dying to know (and I bet a lot of other people) - how the heck do you deal with 2,700+ friends on twitter? You can’t possibly keep up with them - do you have a reader that scans for keywords, pick some at random? What’s your technique? Inquiring mind(s) want to know.
April 7th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Robert: I think you are getting a little carried away with the “three weeks late” comments to that guy Martin. The necessary reality check here is this: the “claimed” 100K users at Twitter is most certainly an accomplishment for a startup, and hats off to them for it. But it is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
If this market is really going to be huge (doubtful), then being a month “late” but a lot better is perfectly fine. The “update pseudo-friends about what I’m having for lunch” bus is still in the station…
April 8th, 2007 at 12:58 am
[...] just not right’ on this issue isn’t over. I was lead to the story from Robert Scoble’s blog post on the subject. Over dinner with some other Bay Area peeps, Chris Carfi is quoted as saying “The reason [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 7:11 am
[...] the jump for the rest of the story, interesting comments from Robert Scoble, and the Twitter stream that continues the [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat?
What is most interesting about Leo’s defection to Jaiku is that he was one of the few key influencers that actually spiked Twitter subscriptions…What Laporte did for Twitter, he is now reproducing for Jaiku. Now, there is a line in the sand. A divi…
April 8th, 2007 at 9:13 am
[...] (Source: Scobleizer) [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
[...] Leo Laporte leaves Twitter for Jaiku (Scoble) [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I’m pissed and sick of Leo abusing his power to sway the masses when he clearly is getting paid to plug these start-ups. He plugged twitter a dozen times and now abandons it? WTF?! Screw him… he can have fun by himself in Jaikuland. Twitter Rocks, Jaiku sucks!
April 8th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
P.S. I’m sick of all of you so called “A Listers” get a freakin’ life and get over yourselves already
April 8th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[...] twitter vs. Jaiku goes - I don’t believe that these two applications are even close to competing. why [...]
April 9th, 2007 at 12:47 am
‘discussion nodes’….
Hahha, too rich, gotta love the buzzwording…
April 9th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I heard Leo on the radio this weekend talking about twitter and jaiku. It was interesting to hear his thoughts on the 2 services (he likes them both). But i think the real reason he left was confusion about TWIT and twitter being too similar in names and confusion arising.
i have to agree with is perspective. his brand was having some confusion applied to it due to the name similarities… i think he actually said he was suggested by legal counsel to send twitter a cease and decist. but he said he would not do that, he likes Evan. ;)
Rodney Rumford
April 24th, 2007 at 11:19 am
We were thinking about the same thing the other day. Why choose between Twitter and Jaiku (and the next moblogging player to enter the space). What if you could ‘twitter’ to any or all moblogging platform? We brought the issue up at the office and the guys came up with EgorCast. The idea is to mashup Jott’s voice to text service with Twitter and Jaiku.
Jott allows users to dial a predetermined number and record a 15 second message. Jott then transcribes the message and emails the transcription to your phone or email account. EgorCast provides a gateway between the messages from Jott and social mo-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku (or both if you want). EgorCast will also send your messages to your WordPress blog with a specific category or tag. So you don’t need to pick…
May 20th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
[...] Jeff Atwood tells me he’s thinking of leaving Twitter for Jaiku. Scoble wrote about how Leo Laporte already left. [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
[...] tool, Jaiku today. Mind, like Mat Ingram, I haven’t actually tried Jaiku, but from all accounts it has a great many similarities to Twitter, although up until now, a fraction of the buzz (and possibly userbase as well, if some imperfect [...]
April 26th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Coincidentally, I just requsted a Jaiku account. I’m hoping that I can use my Google login to access Jaiku; otherwise, I may wait until Google login support is available. I just want to give it a whirl and see what happens.
Apparently there’s an update to this story that I still have to find. http://twitter.com/leolaporte is active.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
[...] Leo Laporte Leaves Twitter for Jaiku - Robert Scoble [...]