There's been some casual conversation around the Net as people dig into . It went huge after SXSW, but has actually been around for a long time now. And Jaiku got a lot of attention recently and has been growing at a pretty steady pace.

First, both are new...in their infancy. That means they're less than perfect and sometimes unreliable. But the teams at both services are working pretty diligently.

Lately Twitter has been referred to in several places as micro-blogging. That's not far off the mark really. Blogging in 140 characters or less.

Jaiku is different because it picks up not just the micro-blogging posts, but feeds from other places too - blogs, last.fm, Flickr and the like. Right now my Jaiku stream is picking up not just the direct posts, but posts from six other feeds too. If Twitter is micro-blogging, Jaiku is micro-streaming.

While it's quirky and everything isn't working quite like it should, I like Jaiku a lot. In an email exchange with a friend who does some PR work with them, I said:

I like Jaiku because if the more conversational aspect it provides in the commenting capability. It eneables new, side conversations, and I see that as powerful. For me, Twitter is a nice messaging tool, but Jaiku is really a lifestream aggregator. It takes all the information flows I choose to provide and aggregates all that information about me that I want to share with others. For me, it's less about presence and more about a holistic view of what different things I'm engaged in because of the feed aggregation capacity.