Mobile web apps and data transfer; Jaiku and twitter
So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.
That’s the difference between twitter and Jaiku. Twitter is an old fashioned website and application that requires data heavy websites to provide you with content whilst jaiku offers a mobile phone that requires minimum data transfer from server to phone
Another big difference is the api. With jaiku you can download all messages without needing an api’s permission. That means you can get all messages. With twitter you need to be patient. Tha api only allows sixty requests per hour… That’s one a minute. With something instant that’s stifling the conversation
Over a month of using twitter on the mobile phone I would count 300 kilobytes or more per refresh whilst with Jaiku I require just 15 megabytes of data transfer over a month to follow the conversation. As a result I much prefer the forward looking attitude that Jaiku have taken. There’s just one drawback, the community is smaller.
Twitter down, massive surge in users recently
For all those that thought twitter was finally a reliable service with a crappy api there is some sad news. Due to a massive increase in the number of users (according to a number of sources) twitter is once again providing a truly rubbish service. We’ll see how long they’re going to be unreliable this time.