Twitter - Fail = Rejaw

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter - Fail = Rejaw

by Lee Mathews Aug 8th 2008

Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.

The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.

Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.

Everything you shout on Rejaw is given a permalink, which allows you to involve your friends in the conversation even if they don't want to sign up. That's right, guest posting is allowed. Privacy lovers rejoice!

Where Rejaw truly shines, though is with its automatic embedding functions. Paste the URL from a YouTube clip in a message, and the embed coode is handled for you. Image URLs also work, as do MP3s. The team is hard at work integrating other embeds, most notably Vimeo, so even more functionality is on the horizon. It's a nice touch, and makes pages much nicer to look at (and more useful) than Twitter's "steaming pile of text" format.

Add API access for developers and the well-built Radar desktop application (watch for my follow-up post), and Rejaw is about as fully featured as microblogging/communication apps get. Rejaw delivers the kind of experience I hoped Twitter would.

Tags: chat, microblog, microblogging, twitter

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Todd said 3:45PM on 8-08-2008

Lee Mathews FAIL.

How do you intend to cause all your Twitter followers to abandon Twitter and sign-up for Rejaw?

Lee Mathews said 3:45PM on 8-08-2008

You're right, I'll have a hard time convincing all six of them!

Kristin Shoemaker said 3:55PM on 8-08-2008

The truth, the hard honest, painful truth is this:

My five sisters and I, we will follow Lee Mathews anywhere. We will, as soon as the debt we're paying back to society for stalking is paid in full.

MrKniceGuy said 5:14PM on 8-08-2008

The only reason I haven't left Twitter yet is the ability to use SMS. Does Rejaw do text messages? I can't seem to find much info on the site.

Rey Bango said 5:16PM on 8-08-2008

Rejaw certainly looks nice but to-date, nobody has displaced Twitter. Not Plurk, Pownce, or even FriendFeed (although it's not a microblogging service).

The million dollar question is whether it'll hold up when pounded on by millions of users...or Robert Scoble.

tony said 6:30PM on 8-08-2008

@Rey - apparently not. Rejaw is not responding for me...

ruben magana said 7:47PM on 8-08-2008

seems very similar to pownce with the embedding and all. except can't share files.

Robert H said 12:12AM on 8-10-2008

Twitter was this fast when it first started. It even auto-refreshed your timeline for a while. I'm guessing that if Rejaw gets anywhere near the volume as Twitter, it will have just as many floating whales.

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