Jaikido Blog

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.”

Posted by Jyri | Permalink

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