It looks as if Jaiku, a microblogging tool purchased by Google last year now has a serious iPhone App thanks to the efforts of mJaiku (a third party company).
While FriendFeed and Twitter fans have two or more options available to them on the iPhone, Jaiku junkies seem to be stuck with mJaiku, whose app will set one back a cup of coffee at McDonalds (or 99 pennies in USD).
Since government bailouts are few and far between for most bloggers, here is a “brief” review of this mJaiku, revealing the good, the bad, and the buggy.
The Good
One if the great things about mJaiku is its simplistic, yet functional approach.
Users can easily look up their recent “joots” (note: think tweets except for Jaiku), as well as see what the rest of the Jaiku galaxy is doing.
Underneath the overview button, you can easily distinguish between your status updates, comments or imported photo albums, links to blogs, etc. (which helps you filter out the noise).
mJaiku also lets you insert a mini cartoon along with your joot, as well as a mini location tag to where they are posting from.
You can also easily comment on another user’s status, which makes it slightly easier to use than most Twitter iPhone apps.
Last but not least, mJaiku seems to load up very fast over EDGE (aka 2G) and Wifi (which is great news if you happen to be traveling through “the boonies”).
The Bad
What I did not like about mJaiku was the lack of a search feature, which makes it difficult to discover what other great minds are jooting about.
Also when posting a domain name, mJaiku does not shorten the domain via tinyurl or bit.ly (which is very useful when you only have 140 characters to type).
While posting images is not exactly standard with Jaiku (not to mention Twitter as well), it would be cool to see this included in a future update.
The Buggy?
I did not encounter any serious bugs aside from a random joot being half way published when an icon image was added (although this may be on Google’s end rather than mJaiku’s).
Conclusion
Costing only $1, I would conclude that mJaiku is well worth the price.
Despite the lack of rivals, I do hope that mJaiku continues to innovate their iPhone app, as Google may have plans to turn their microblogging feature into a serious Twitter/FriendFeed competitor (at least on mobile devices).
