Twitter hits the mainstream...

...just as I'm about to wave goodbye to it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a three page article on Twitter, the latest darling of the hyped-up 2.0 set.

This amuses me as, once again, I'm stepping off a bandwagon just as the mainstream media picks up on it. I was curious about Twitter for a number of reasons, including because it was new, it revelled in its simplicity but also because it was the latest brainwave of Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger, before it was assimilated by Google.

Ultimately, I just didn't really get Twitter. Maybe it was because I didn't have any actual friends, real or virtual, who used the service. In the end it became almost like a micro-rss reader as I slowly stopped updating my own account but kept reading a handful of others. It hasn't helped that Australian users were denied SMS access while Twitter changed the UK number it recommended we use, while at the same time it seemed like the Twitter servers were down every other day. Scaling up can be a hassle sometimes, I guess.

So now I'm on that other great micro-blogging hype machine, Jaiku. Jaiku is similar, but has more features such as comments and "channels" (kind of like an old-school irc channel with a shiny 2.0 interface) and, to me, a stronger feeling of community.

*shrug*

I might just as likely drop Jaiku as quickly as I've let Twitter slide. Half of the fun is trying out new things so it won't be time wasted, even if it wasn't time spent being productive.