Microblogging Service Rejaw Shuts Down: A Victim of Twitter's Success?

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:58:40 -0800

Last summer, while Twitter was struggling to keep its servers running consistently, a number of rivaling microblogging services like Plurk and Rejaw arrived on the scene, ready to capitalize on the imminent exodus of Twitter's disgruntled users. Twitter, however, was able to turn its fortunes around and is now just about as stable as any other online service. It is also growing at an impressive rate and has become the de facto standard for microblogging in most users' minds. For Twitter's competitors, however, this has meant that there are fewer users to go around, and today, Rejaw announced that it will shut down its servers on May 31st.

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]]> Rejaw has stopped accepting new sign-ups and will allow its users to export their data as an XML file.

In the absence of real interoperability between the different microblogging and messaging services, Twitter, which already has the most users, will only gain momentum. With Identi.ca and Laconi.ca, we do have real, open-source, standard-based alternatives to Twitter, but the sheer momentum behind Twitter will make it increasingly hard for newcomers to break through to a large enough audience.

In many ways, this is quite a shame, as most of the innovation around Twitter has come from third-party developers, while services like Rejaw, for example, tried out a lot of interesting features and user interfaces. Rejaw, for example, made 'real' real-time messaging a core feature of its platform.

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Rejaw: Combining Microblogging + Chat

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:54:54 -0800

We just got word of an interesting new microblogging service: Rejaw. Rejaw is an interesting combination of microblogging with real-time chat. In some ways, it is similar to Plurk and Identi.ca, but its interface looks a lot more traditional and instead of just alerting you to updates, it pushes them directly onto your screen in real-time. On the client side, Rejaw is taking the unusual route of releasing a Mac client first. A Windows version should follow in the very near future and the team is also planning to release an iPhone app.

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]]> Rejaw puts a number of very nifty twists on the microblogging genre. In testing out the service, the immediate updates to the discussions really added a different level of interactivity to the experience. And while most other micro-blogging services put a strong emphasis on keeping messages extremely short, Rejaw allows its users to write up to 1000 characters per message.

Shouts and Whispers

Rejaw differentiates between sending out 'shouts,' which go out to all of your followers as well as the public timeline, and 'whispers,' which are direct and private messages.

To find your friends, Rejaw can look at your Facebook and Google Mail profile, or you can search by name.

At the bottom of the page, you can always see if there are any new 'shouts' or 'whispers' and clicking on those links will take you directly to the appropriate pages.

As is to be expected, every conversation on Rejaw also gets its own permalink and Rejaw also provides RSS feeds for all conversations.

Payloads

One very cool aspect of Rejaw is that you can just post links to images (we tested this with jpg and png files), YouTube and Google videos, as well as mp3 and flv files into your posts and they will immediately appear in a mediaplayer in your timeline. The team behind Rejaw is also responsible for Lingr, which uses the same technology at the back-end.

API

Right from the start, Rejaw offers an API to developers who want to integrate the service into their own tools.

Verdict

So how does Rejaw stack up against Twitter and its brethren? In trying out the service for a while this morning, we really enjoyed the immediate interaction with others on the site. We only noticed one minor bug with regards to deleting already posted messages on the site, but otherwise, the service feels extremely well thought out already and we didn't experience any other issues in our tests. We especially liked how easy it was to embed videos, pictures, and audio into the posts and comments.

If you would like to add me to your friends on Rejaw, you can find my profile here.