Jaikido Blog

We’ve been working quietly for a while to port Jaiku to Google infrastructure. Today we’re taking off our welding goggles to announce Jaiku will be one of the first apps to run on the new Google App Engine.

The Google App Engine enables applications to leverage powerful Google technologies and scale up to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

Jaiku will be fully deployed on the Google App Engine in the near future. Andy & co. are working hard to ensure the port is a success and we will make a further announcement once the port has been completed.

It’s finally here - a SMS shortcode for our U.S. users to enjoy! If you have a U.S. phone, you can now post Jaikus by texting to 30300.

You can also receive notifications of new posts from your friends and follow channels. For a complete list of functions, see our SMS help. Jaiku is free; standard operator SMS charges apply.

Jaiku members can activate their mobile number at http://jaiku.com/settings/mobile. The SMS service should currently function on all U.S. carriers except T-Mobile. (We are planning to add T-Mobile later). As always, please let us know your feedback on the Jaiku channel.

For those of you heading to SXSW, this should make coordinating easier :)

If you access Jaiku using third-party applications, you might have noticed that the apps you use are displaying a message asking you to sign in with your API key. Here’s why: a Jaiku user recently let us know about a security vulnerability in an iGoogle gadget developed by a third party. The gadget was exposing user API keys in certain instances, and while we haven’t seen any reports of malicious use, we’ve pulled the gadget down and are working with the developer to correct the issue. We’ve also reset all Jaiku API keys to restore the security of accessing Jaiku using third-party apps.

To get your new API key, go to http://jaiku.com/api. And, as always, please exercise caution when sharing your API key with third parties — don’t share it anywhere you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing your password.

Over the past days we’ve been working to address the performance issues some of you have experienced lately. Starting on Wednesday, January 16, at 12:01 am PST (08:01 GMT), we will take Jaiku offline for approximately 24 hours to complete a set of related maintenance operations. Once things are back up and running, any posts made before December 16, 2007, will be temporarily unavailable as we move them to another database to make Jaiku even faster. Once we’ve completed the move, all your previous posts, feeds, and comments will be made available to you again.

We know there’s never a good time for downtime, but we want to get Jaiku back into top form as quickly as possible, so we can focus on all the other things we have in store for you. Thanks again for your patience, and — as always — let us know if you have any questions.

It’s been a while since we’ve given you a decent update on Jaiku, and it looks like more than a few of you are wondering what’s going on and what’s in store for the future. That’s completely our fault — between joining the Google team, the holiday season, and all the new stuff we’ve been working on, it’s been a hectic three months. Here’s a quick update:

First, we know the Jaiku site is currently not as responsive as it should be. The issue is that users (some of them spammers) are starting to add new feeds to their accounts at a more rapid pace, so we’re working on cleaning up the database to get the site back to its normal level of responsiveness. We should have everything sorted out soon; in the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Second, I know you’re all excited to hear what’s next for Jaiku and what we’ve been working on since joining Google. To be honest, a lot of our time in the early going was spent on getting to know Google. And, of course, a little R&R during the holidays. But we’ve also been working hard on the next steps for Jaiku, and are already making progress on what I think are some cool new ways to help you stay connected with the people you care about. We can’t share any of the specifics right now, but stay tuned.

And, as always, don’t be shy about letting us know what you’d like to see from Jaiku, how you think Jaiku might complement the Google products you use, and how you’d like to be involved in all this. We are definitely listening!

Exciting news: Google has bought Jaiku today.

What does that mean? First and foremost, we’re of course continuing to support our existing users. So fear not: your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally.

That said, new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being. The idea here is to enable our team to get right to work with Google’s engineers on delivering a new, better service to you as quickly as we can instead of spending our efforts on optimizing the current back-end. Existing users will still be able to invite their friends, and those who are not yet on Jaiku can send us a request for an invitation to join.

We’ve put together a short FAQ about the acquisition, and we’ll continue to provide support on the #jaiku channel. But we’re eager to go beyond what’s there today, and build something completely new for you to enjoy. Take this as an invitation to join us on a journey to reinvent how you communicate and stay in touch with the people you care about.

Jyri, Petteri, and team

Tim O’Reilly’s got a lovely a post titled I love my iPhone, but…bah, no Jaiku! on O’Reilly Radar.

Tim writes that as he switched from a Nokia S60 phone to an iPhone, he found himself missing Jaiku’s presence-enabled phonebook for the Nokia handsets.

“This is the way a phone address book ought to work. I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven “social networking application” represents my real social network. On the series 60 phone, Jaiku was able to embrace and extend the address book. That’s just not possible on the iPhone.”

It’s a great read, and a nice nudge towards Apple.

Today we’ve released a new, much better way to browse and manage your connections to other people on Jaiku.

In response to many user requests, we’ve added a way to easily check who’s following you. In other words, you can now find out the truth about how popular you really are…

And should you so desire, you can now easily reciprocate by adding your followers as your contacts with one click.

Also, as part of the overhaul, we’ve renamed the ‘Contacts’ section to ‘People’, so everyone can find it easily, and to reflect the broader range of connections you can now manage there.

Last but not least, we’ve added a new feature called ‘People you might know’. It is a list of the newly joined members that people you follow have added as their contacts. This is a great way to find real-life friends to connect with on Jaiku, so we encourage you to go take a look and try it out.

As a quick recap, the main features of the release are as follows:

• “Contacts” section is now titled “People”
• An easy-to-manage list of your contacts
• A list of your followers
• New people on Jaiku that you might know

…So get in there, and find out who loves you that you’ve been missing for all this time!

After the introduction of our IM interface to Jaiku last week, we received a lot of valuable user feedback. Ralph put in some extra hours, and today we’re introducing a few important improvements.

Firstly, we’ve simplified the activation. You can now just add jaiku@jaiku.com to your buddy list using your desktop IM application, and send the IM message “SIGN IN <screenname> <password>” to log in to your Jaiku account.

You can also create a new Jaiku account by sending the message “SIGN UP <desired username>”. The bot will generate a password for you, and you’re set to go.

Secondly, you can now easily sign out of your Jaiku account and sign in as a different user. To do so, just send “SIGN OUT” and you’re ready to sign in with a different identity.

If you accidentally created a new Jaiku account, you can delete it with the command “DELETE ME”. (We’ve added a confirmation step that asks you to send “DELETE ME” once more to prevent mistakes).

Thanks to everyone who took the time to send us suggestions and feedback!

While Ralph and Andy have been pretty busy preparing the Instant Messaging release, Juha hasn’t exactly been sitting around idle either. He has added some cool new features to the Web site:

• There’s now a Person and channel search (an oft-requested feature) in the sidebar of the Overview and Channels pages so you can easily find channels and friends
• Google results from the public content on Jaiku are also included!
• The Explore page now displays just the latest public Jaikus (photos and Web feeds have been omitted)
• And check this out: the Explore sidebar now lists five currently most active publicly viewable conversations on Jaiku. We already find ourselves constantly checking for interesting new threads :)

Additionally, we’ve made improvements to our Help pages. You’ll also notice we’ve moved the show/hide comments link to a more accessible spot on the top right of your Overview stream.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or comments about these new updates, please feel free to give us your feedback on #jaiku. Thanks!