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Leo Laporte is a bleeding edge technology kind of guy. He’s what marketing monkeys call an “influencer”. He certainly has gravity as a tech/internet celebrity. There is no doubt he’s had a major impact on the massive jump in Twitter popularity in the last 6-8 weeks. Evan even acknowledges this in his recent interview with Jason Calacanis. Now Leo is leaving Twitter for Jaiku a competing service to Twitter.

Leo says the reason for the move is confusing with the name Twitter. Leo’s new project, one that started before Twitter, is called TWiT.tv, or This Week in Tech. They do several podcasts and video casts. I’m willing to bet that this is the real and honest reason for leaving Twitter and I don’t claim to know Leo’s audience as well as he does but it seems like the tech savvy viewers of Leo’s work would obviously (pun intended) know the difference. Branding is a concern for any company and this will be an interesting story to follow. Leo has asked Evan for his account on Twitter to be deleted, which is a shame. Leo is the most “followed” person on Twitter right now with 4,420, nearly double Robert Scoble who is also a huge driving force in terms of sending folks over to Twitter. Leo only has 57 people on Jaiku at the time of this writing. The interesting thing will be to see if Leo has enough mass to pull users away from the gravity he and others have created around Twitter.

You can check out Leo’s page on Jaiku at chieftwit.jaiku.com.

Other people are also talking about this story:

• Joi Ito on Jaiku vs. Twitter
• Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat? Let’s Ask Those Defining the Landscape
• Attention Leo - I couldn’t careless about TWiT
• Leo Laporte leaves Twitter for Jaiku (Scoble)
• Digg Monkeys discuss it
• Twitter is so last week, now its Jaiku

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Jaiku, Leo Leporte