Jaikido Blog

Update: the issue with our SMS provider (see details) has now been solved and the SMS service is functional again worldwide. Thanks for your patience!

Folks, our SMS provider has let us know they will be performing maintenance on their system on Tuesday, June 10th, between 00:00 - 06:00 AM Central European time. This is going to affect the Jaiku SMS services worldwide. We’re expecting two short outages within this time period. Our provider’s assured us they’ll do their best to minimize the disturbance.

Recently a bunch of you have been ruminating about the fate of Jaiku. We know. It is frustrating. We believe the migration to Google App Engine will result in improved stability, so we made the hard call to invest all of our effort in finishing up the port rather than do what was needed to keep up our old servers up to date (it is hard to keep up a service of this scale with 1GB RAM…).

Also, contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too. Thanks for sticking with us!

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.

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!