(Disclosure: I’ve never used Twitter or Jaiku. For some reason, while I tend to explore the concepts of new technologies very early via things like Defrag, I tend to actually adopt those technologies very late.)
Ross Mayfield has an interesting post on Jaiku — a company that I first learned of (and interacted with) a couple of weeks ago. Jaiku’s getting a lot of notice lately in the wake of the Twitter wave.
Ross points us to this interview with one of Jaiku’s founders. A couple of quotes caught my eye:
“We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers.”
The very early thoughts (all Brad’s) around Defrag talked about how information was “swamping the boat” — and how the search was on for tools that helped provide context, relevance and aggregation to that “river” of information (this led us to the idea of turning information into “knowledge”). Jaiku’s falling right into the groove on this one — what it means when “constant connectedness” demands more “context.”
(2nd quote)
“Jyri calls this social peripheral vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss.”
…which brings me to the second high-level thing we realized about Defrag very early on: the essential action is one of “discovery.” It is important to note that I treat “discovery” as quite different from “search.” Discovery can occur in persistant ways (via Wikis and collaborative space), in contextual ways (feeds, aggregators, “people search”), in peripheral ways (Jaiku and Twitter), in dynamic ways (think “semantic web”) — and in a bunch of ways that I’m sure I don’t understand yet.
“Discovery” as a high-level concept begins to bring together a bunch of companies (around those ways):
Persistance (SocialText and HiveLive)
Contextual (Newsgator, Lijit and Collective Intelligence)
Peripheral (Jaiku and Twitter)
Dynamic (Radar Networks)
and I wouldn’t call any of those companies “search” companies…
So, what’s the idea of Defrag? That these companies *think* (or are perceived as) they’re working on different problem sets, but in reality, they’re working on different pieces of the same problem. Different bits, if you will…..different bits that we should reconstitute into a common…..well, you know where I’m going with that metaphor 
