Introducing Rejaw, Another Micro-blogging Service

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Ricky, dude, I’m already on Twitter/FriendFeed/Jaiku/whateverelse, why on *earth* would I want another one?” To be honest, it’s a great question. I’ve recently discovered Rejaw, and despite some initial skepticism (and a few notably lacking features), I’m really rather impressed overall. Here’s why…

First up, what is Rejaw? From their site: “Rejaw is a new way to communicate in real-time with friends, family, and co-workers. You can shout messages to your followers, or whisper to your friends. Monologue or dialogue, micro-blog or status update, soliloquy or dialectic – how you use Rejaw is up to you.”

So basically it’s a microblogging service without the feeds. It also has chat built-in, so that when you’re viewing a thread, if someone adds to it, that’s updated in real-time. This works *really* well, and is one of my favorite features already. There’s also a really great feature that automatically embeds any photo/video/music that you link to. Very slick.

Rejaw is obviously still pretty young, and as such, unfortunately, there’s only the website and an official Mac client. There is also a Firefox plugin, which should allow Linux and Windows users to get in on the fun, but it really only alerts you to new shouts/whispers, and doesn’t offer any additional functionality. Development is in place for a mobile-friendly version, as well, though not sure if that’s to be a client or simply mobile-friendly website.

You can check out more coverage at ReadWriteWeb and ArsTechnica, too.

Obviously I’m pretty firmly embedded in Jaiku, and have a great community built there, but it’s no secret that development seems to be at a complete standstill since the Google buy-out. If things keep moving along at Rejaw, you just may find me over there more.