Jaikido Blog

Snuck a couple small features in over the last couple days that we thought we might point out:

First, pagination has changed a little, changing from a list of page numbers to just older/newer links. This change will make some minor speed improvements but may not be the final decision so you are invited to give feedback. Also, by popular request, pagination was added to the overview page.

Second, in the list of feeds related to your Jaiku stream you will notice some have become links. As we get new updates from feeds we’ve also begun recording the url that the feed points to. They are only updated when there is actually new content pulled from the site so you may want to update something in a feed if you notice a link is missing.

We see quite a few questions from people asking about why their feed hasn’t updated or is slow to update (we’re working on speeding it up) so we thought we’d give everyone a little heads up on how it is all working and how we are working to speed it up.

Step 1: Figure out what needs to be updated

The common case is that we will update anything more than 30 minutes old, we don’t have a per-feed setting for update frequency at the moment, though we’d like one.

Step 2: Queue ‘em up

We grab a certain number of the items that haven’t been updated the longest and add them to a queue for processing.

A couple services requested that we poll less frequently so we don’t query any feeds from their servers more than once every minute — if we run into one of them that has happening too fast it gets kicked back in the queue for a bit. Unfortunately, there are only 1440 minutes in a day so this obviously doesn’t scale, we are interested in finding ways to alleviate this so that users of these services can have a better experience on Jaiku.

Step 3: Process them

Download the streams, find out if there are updates, add them to the site. The tricky part is again related to scale, we can only process so many of these every minute and unfortunately (well, a bit fortunately for us) we have quite more than enough users who have feeds becoming due to be updated every minute than we can actually run through in a minute, this means it can take more than the desired 30 minutes to update the feed.

Conclusion

Solutions to the update frequency problems will be adding more servers and bandwidth to the mix, which we are actively doing, so it will become more timely as we try to keep up with new users and their feeds.

Hope that helped explain some things for people.

For a while now we’ve been laboring away quietly on a new feature, Channels.

Channels enable multiple people to post to the same Jaiku stream. To start posting to a channel, go to its page, click Join, and type your message in the field that appears.

Channels offer a way to participate in conversations without broadcasting the messages to all your followers, because the Jaikus and comments that you post to a channel show up on the channel only – your personal stream at yourname.jaiku.com stays untouched. If you think your followers should follow the conversation, tell them to join the channel :)

Soon everyone will be able to create channels freely, but before that’s ready, you can join the channels that we’ve created. Click the new “Channels” link in the top navigation to see the directory of currently available channels.

To post to a channel by SMS from your phone, text #channelname followed by your message to +46 73 74 94 05 01 +46 49 47 37 05 01(or 17273 in Finland). For example: #buzzoutloud Hello everyone!

We really appreciate your comments and suggestions for improving the alpha, so feel free to post away on the Jaiku Support and Ideas channel.

We’re still working on moderation for channels, so please be aware that at this point the channels are not moderated. If you want to report abuse or file a bug, please email us at bugs at jaiku dot com.

In other news, this week we’re working on a bunch of UI fixes to the Overview page. I’ll blog about those as soon as we’re ready to update the site.

Have a great week everyone!

The finals of the Eurovision Song Contest, the traditional European version of the American Idol, will be held in Jaiku’s home town Helsinki today. We’ve set up an open Jaiku Eurovision Commentary channel (we’ll be posting more information about channels soon) for live commentary on the event.

One of the commentators to join the Commentary channel is the 2006 Eurovision winner Mr. Lordi (Tomi Putaansuu). Now visitors and fans can follow Mr. Lordi and the other commentators and participate in the conversation about the Eurovision 2007 event.

For those not familiar with Lordi, the group has gained immense popularity and is now a household name in Europe. Their explosive live shows lace pyrotechnic special effects with monster costumes and catchy hard rock music. Lordi has confirmed their place in the heart of music lovers and won respect within the music business.

Just a few minutes ago Lordi posted: “Finally the mask is off for today.. Few hours of sleep and then the same thing all over again. Last day of eurovision for me tomorrow.. Feels kinda weird but relieved.”

We’re totally stoked to enable the global community of Lordi and Eurovision fans to exchange commentary with Mr. Lordi and each other live from the event, while watching it at home, or anywhere they might happen to be.

We’ve also partnered with SubTV, Finland’s third-largest commercial TV channel and leading youth media, to bring Finland’s global humor ambassador Markku from Finland to Jaiku. Check out the joint Jaiku-SubTV press release for more details.

Finally, We’d never let such an opportunity for a bash slip by, so we’re throwing a party at Korjaamo (the old tram repair shops) starting 9 pm this evening.

If you’re in town for the event, this is your chance to watch Lordi and the Eurovision 2007 finals from big screens, coupled with with live commentary from Jaiku’s backchannel.

We hope to see all the Helsinki Jaikuers there! There’s no cover charge.

Yikes, our apologies for neglecting our blog for so long, we’ve been distracted with making things faster and stronger and adding new features…

… but enough about us, go check out all the cool stuff that the community has been making, we’ve got all kinds of projects with support for Jaiku now over at http://devku.org/projects.

To keep up to date on the developments on these projects and the state of the API and even feature request stuff you can join the devku channel on Jaiku.