It’s true that twitter was the first who introduces the concept of mini blogging and the guys there were pretty good at the beginning, adding new features all the time according to the users’ activities and so on. But lately, they’ve been (to me) a complete failure after they changed their international number. And for some reason it stopped working in Lebanon and some other countries including Egypt as I received complaints from fellow twitterers…Dear Egyptian twitterers, don’t bother to contact them because it’s useless, their reply (if any) will be a list of the supported networks (which will include yours ofcourse) and that’s it. I wish I have the email they sent me but I deleted it long time ago..

So what are the alternatives?!?! Quitting mini blogging isn’t an option ofcourse, once you get used to it you can’t quit it. Believe me I tried!!
What else?!

1. There’s watwet, a new member to the toot and ikbis families (are there others?). It’s not bad but it doesn’t offer anything new and
a. The mobile service only supports Zain (in Jordan) numbers. I hope it’s just for now and that they’ll add more in the future. But even if they did, I doubt I’ll use it (although I created an account there).

b. Why? look at the public timeline..It reminds me of Melody Tunes SMS bar….

c. They have this upload photos section, via the web or MMS. It’s a nice idea but I don’t need it that much in mini blogging. It would be much better if I can post photos I uploaded on ikbis of flickr instead of uploading them in watwet all over again…Bloggers don’t need an extra place to upload photos!!

d. Oh..And I don’t remember reading somewhere about IM-watweting or adding some badges to a blog or something (you can use your feed for now if you want to).

So as a start, watwet isn’t bad but not good enough..

2. There’s Jaiku..and it’s now the Google’s twitter..I have to say I was impressed!!
a. Mobile-Jaikuing works!!!!!

b. They have this “add feeds” option, you can add any feed (rss or atom) to your account and your jaiku timeline will be updated with anything new on the feeds. I loved this one!! very much! I added my twitter feed..LOL

c. IM-Jaikuing works too, and the supported services are Google Talk, LiveJournal, and Jabber. AIM, Yahoo, and MSN are supported too via IMfied. It’s pretty annoying though that they add too much info in your IM-Jaiku-updates, such as the link of the updated and the original message (if it’s a reply) or a link of the posted item (if it’s a feed). But it’s fine I’ll get used to it I guess..

d. When you add a contact, you can choose what you get from him/her not everything. For example, I can choose to only receive Jaiku and flickr updates from a contact and exclude his/her delicious tags. I love this one too

UPDATE, I forgot this:
e. Channels, it’s new…you create your own channels about anything, and get your friends to join them. This concept of categorizing your updates is amazing!!!

I don’t know if there are any other alternatives. If you happen to know please tell me but I guess I’ll stick to Jaiku for now, obviously it’s is my winner!!! UPDATE:Now the only problem with Jaiku is that it’s not Twitter. The community in twitter is large and you can find almost anything there. Jaiku still doesn’t have that, I hope by time they’ll get there…and I hope that by time, they’ll get rid of the “twitter-like” in their description on the web..

And what’s with the weird names?!?! Is it a must for mini blogging services to have a funny name?? 😛

One more thing, Good morning 🙂 It’s a nice day today, I feel it!! Wish you a great day as well!!