Wednesday 20 February 2013

Microblog Cubecakes pt2: Jaiku & Qaiku

Adocu's server (I think) was pretty unstable that time so it went offline. I realized  that since I have a lot of followers on Twitter, I need some space to put all my personal ramblings without offending any of my followers. Since my ramblings are short & randomly comes out at weird times, it has to be another microblog. And that's when Jaiku came in.


Well, actually I was torn between Jaiku and Identi.ca. I mean for one thing, Identica lets you update Facebook statuses, while Jaiku used to be able to do that, but not anymore (it probably lost its features ever since Google acquired it, idk). But still, what made me chose Jaiku first was those adorable icons. And the fresh green theme.

And Adocu came back. Since then, those three became my main sites to vent & shout random stuff. Moreover I can import my Twitter & Jaiku feeds into Soup and use the RSS import for Adocu (eventhough I still cant update Facebook with Jaiku)

I would still like to try Identica sometime in the future. Cuz this was what happened. It upgraded and I can't see the theme/look customization options anymore.
Well, Status.net has themes, but I still have no clue on how to install them.


A year later, Jaiku announced that it was closing down. I'd pick Identica if it was still in its old layout (not saying the newer one sucks, no, it's all just web evolution) but then I stumbled into something. Qaiku. It rhymes with Jaiku so I assumed it was an obvious clone of Jaiku. I decided to read articles & reviews about its background before finally deciding to make a Qaiku account... a bit early.


Jaiku finally died. I'll miss it cuz Qaiku just isn't the same (although it has more useful features... but still no cute icons)

Sunday 17 February 2013

Microblog Cubecakes pt1: Kronologger & Adocu

Well, you all know the story of how I got a Twitter account... And thus I shall tell you the tale of when I got bored of Twitter and wanted to try the auras of other new sites. Now I've already known there were a lot of Twitter alternatives, THOUSANDS of them. But it only came around to me that I wanted to try some of them. First, there's Kronologger.

   
Lol the cameo in here is one of my good friends... and the first boy cameo to appear on Webcubecakes wheeee~

Kronologger might be the same age as Twitter (or younger or older, I'm not sure) but it doesnt look as pretty. I thought I'd give it a try, still, seeing that what makes me want to try is that it allows us to connect to Facebook and update our status without logging in Fb. Since our university internet blocks access to popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter & Youtube, it doesn't recognize Kronologger much. Now there's an advantage of using less popular sites.

Since Kronologger is Indonesian, I wrote most of my updates in Indonesian & was planning to keep my English updates in Twitter and my Indonesian ones in Kronologger. But it died shortly, like a month after I used it, so once again, my Twitter updates are in mixed languages.
It also has different themes and I tried a few themes. Some parodied existing sites like the Digg theme, the Google theme and the Old School Tumblr theme.

I had a good time with Kronologger... until it died one month later.




And I decided to move on to Adocu. Not only cuz it looks simple and clean, it's a nanoblogging site and that was new to me that time (I still don't know any nanoblogging sites that only allow us to update with one word besides Adocu. There's Hycku though, but it uses only 7 words, not 1)

It was really fun using Adocu (and seeing the long-ass words in our updates) but it gets boring after a while, as there's not much customizations to be done. But occasionally it gives me a fresh breath of a different kind of status updates.