Jaikido Blog

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!

Our IM service is today available for general use. We’ve had our lovely beta testers thrashing at it for a while now, and they’ve done their best to help us make it great!

Jaiku IM allows you to communicate with all your Jaiku contacts using your (XMPP based) instant messaging client, such as Google Talk.

Here’s what you get in a nutshell:

• Notifications of new Jaikus from your contacts
• Web feeds items from the feeds you follow
• Commenting using @screenname
• Post your own Jaikus (even to channels!) right from your desktop

Of course, sometimes you might want to not have all that going on in your IM, so you can even stop the updates for a while (we don’t mind, honestly - we know you actually need to work sometimes).

To get started, go to your Jaiku IM settings page (you’ll need to be logged in), enter your IM address into the box, and click ‘Activate’. You’ll be presented with a passcode (this is how we make sure that people can only activate their own account). Then, add jaiku@jaiku.com to your buddy list in your IM client, and send us an IM message containing the passcode you were presented. It’s that easy!

For more help, see the Instant Messaging How-to in our Help & FAQ section. There’s also a quick reference to IM & SMS commands.

If you’ve got questions, problems, or just want to hang around with a bunch of IMing Jaikuers you can join #imku (that’s where our beta testers have been hanging out).

Speaking of our beta testers, we owed them a big vote of thanks - services like this wouldn’t be anywhere near as great as they are without feedback from our dedicated team of testers. So… Thanks folks! Keep the feedback coming :)

You’ve heard us talking about it, possibly even had one of our lovely beta testers telling you how great it’s going to be; now it’s out in the wild, and ready for you to download.

The main push of this release is to let you bring the rich conversation you’ve been enjoying on our website with you out into the world on your S60 mobile, and man, has it done that. Our beta users have been saying things like “I almost never bother with the website these days” (but don’t tell our web-dev team that) and “One of the most polished S60 apps I’ve seen.”.

Other new features include:

• The choice between longer battery life or more up-to-date presence (a much requested feature).
• Reading and writing comments from and to your contacts.
• Go back in time! Using the ’stream view’ for your contacts, you can see what they were doing and saying in the past, not just their most recent post.
• More than just Jaikus! You can also see when your contacts have posted to flickr.
• Improved presence view, to make the most of your screen real-estate.
• A whole raft of usability improvements, based on what our users have been telling us they need, including an even easier to use interface, and a progress meter, so you can see what’s happening.
• More optimal data transfer and connection maintenance, giving you more bang for your wireless data dollar.
• …and all the essential (but not that interesting) stuff like bug fixes, speed improvements, that sort of thing.
• Oh, and let’s not forget - a spiffy new manual for this client.

Phonebook

Status

Conversation

It’s hard to explain just how much of an improvement this version is over the previous release - you’ll have to install it for yourself to really find out!

Of course, all your favourite features from the previous release are still there as well:

• The live contact list works just like your phone’s built-in phonebook, and enhances the list with the buddy icons and real-time presence of your Jaiku contacts
• Post new Jaikus and have them immediately appear on the Web and your contacts’; phones
• Share your availability based on your phone’s ring profile
• Share your location based on free naming of cell towers
• Option to share your phone calendar (choose to share full titles of events or just when you are free/busy)
• Option to share number of nearby people based on detection of Bluetooth phones
• Switch Jaiku online or offline at any time
• Easy wizard guides you through the setup
• Automatic roaming detection alerts you when you are roaming away from your home network

If you’d like to know even more about our new client, there’s a video review of an earlier beta by Jonathan Greene, as well as a comprehensive 3 part review by Ken Camp (part 1, part 2, part 3).

Now, if you’re not lucky enough to have an S60 phone, of course you can still join in on the mobile Jaiku fun.

Firstly, there’s our Mobile Site - http://m.jaiku.com/ - I’m told it works great for you lucky folk with iPhones!

There’s also the Jaiku Widget, which will run on most modern phones (as long as they’ve got Java support).

All the time, the wonderful development community that’s grown around Jaiku is creating new and interesting applications. Don’t forget to check some of them out at Jaikufans.com.