Jaikido Blog

It was great to see such a good turnout at my rich presence session at FOO Camp this morning. There are a few odd bits of documentation on the FOO Camp wiki. The comments from Linda Stone resonated particularly. Stone is known for her concept of continuous partial attention, which she defines as follows:

“To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.”

Rich presence is definitely about being a ‘live node on the network’. However, as Linda pointed out it also decreases the need to disturb people with blind calls, IMs and emails. That suggests it could help reduce some of the stress associated with continuous partial attention.

Teemu is back from his European tour, and we’ve started working on the next release based on the feedback from the snazzin’ early adopters. Mika will get back from his stint in Silicon Valley next week (check out his ISEA project), and that’s when we’ll start working on new features for the presence server. Meanwhile, Petteri and I have been working to arrange seed financing for Jaiku. No announcements to make yet :)

I’ll be at FOO Camp in Sebastopol this weekend, and in the San Francisco Bay Area next week. If anyone there would like to meet up and discuss Jaiku, please give me a shout. Thanks!

If you’re running Jaiku on a S60 phone, you can send connection invitations to your contacts from the phone by scrolling to the name of the contact, pressing Options, and selecting ‘Invite to Jaiku.’ Here’s a screenshot from my N70:

Based on a report from one user, we identified a bug in the SMS invites that caused some invite links to load an error page. The bug is now fixed - so if you received a broken invite, please try clicking the link again!

Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming :)

To uninstall Jaiku from your phone, please follow the uninstallation instructions. In this early beta version, you need to select ‘Shutdown Jaiku’ from Jaiku Settings and ‘Close Jaiku Contacts’ from Jaiku Contacts before uninstalling. We’ll fix this in later versions of the client.

Justin Hall discussed the possibilities Jaiku offers in his keynote at the Mobile Game Conference in Seattle. Here’s the MP3 recording of the talk. Justin does a great job explaining Jaiku, and envisions rich presence-enabled ‘passively multiplayer online games’.

In a related interview, he is quoted saying: “I love the idea of rich presence, because my friends are the content.”

The talk is worth quoting at length:

“Jaiku is a replacement for your contact list and your calendar. It takes over the core functionality of your connected mobile device. If you give Jaiku permission, it will broadcast your affairs.

If your contact gives you permission on Jaiku, their phone tells you where they are: contry, city, and neighborhood based on cell towers. If they’ve labeled the current activity, it tells you what it is. If there are any other Bluetooth devices nearby, it tells you how many other people are nearby with phones, if there are computers with Blutetooth IDs it tells what those computers are. So you can look and see, ‘Oh! This person’s around six people and they’re all strangers. He must be on a bus. This person’s around five people, they’re all our friends, they’re having a party without me!’

It tells you whether their ringer is on, when was the last time they answered a phone call or sent a text message, so you know how close they are to the phone. And you can publish all of this to your weblog. So you select what you want to tell your contacts, you select what you want to tell in public.

This is an enormous amount of privacy you’re willing to give up, one might argue, but it allows for such a rich level of presence. If I want to reach someone, I don’t just call them. And I don’t just rudely text message them out of the middle of nowhere. I look and see: Oh, they’re in a meeting with four other people they work with. Or all the scenarios that pop into your head if you knew where your friends were right now, what they said they were doing and who they were with.

You would know so much about your community, it’d be as though your buddy list was a game.”

This June’s Reboot conference was a sort of unexpected kickoff for Jaiku. I suggested there that the next big opportunity for value-creation in the mobile space would be in enabling social peripheral vision. After the talk Mika Raento walked up, introduced himself and told me, ‘I think I’ve already implemented what you just described.’ Less than two weeks after Reboot Mika and I gave a presentation on Jaiku together at Aula, and just under a month later the team released the beta.

Here are the transcript and slides of the Reboot talk.