Jaikido Blog

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!

Robert Scoble interviewed Petteri and I in San Francisco about Jaiku and the microblogging space. We covered a bit of background about the service and talked about the next steps.

“Jaiku was the first to bring us threaded discussions and a Facebook app that works. Plus, Leo Laporte loves it, so lots of people have joined it,” Scoble wrote in the intro. It’s great talking to Scoble. He knows what to ask and he’s got a strong intuition about what will work going forward.

See the ScobleShow page for the interview and discussion or watch the embedded video below.

Jaikuers may have noticed the ‘alpha’ label on the Channels page has recently changed to ‘beta.’ As a Jaiku member, you are now free to create up to three channels of your own.

Hundreds of channels have already been created: you can, for instance, follow coverage on the iPhone, join the Jaiku fans, follow the Roskilde music festival, or learn Japanese.

Browse the channel list for more channels.

Posting to channels

All channels have a screen name that starts with the number sign # to distinguish them from people. You can post to channels from any Jaiku interface, including third-party Jaiku applications, SMS, and Jaiku Mobile by starting your post with #channelname followed by your message.

Creating a channel

To create a channel, sign in with your Jaiku account (or sign up if you are a new member), click on Channels in the top navigation bar, and select “Create a new channel”.

Once you’ve given your new channel a screen name, you will be taken to the page of the new channel. You are now free to start posting to the channel directly from the Web or using any of the other Jaiku interfaces.

Customizing your channel

Click “Edit Settings” to edit the description, icon, and background of the channel and add a link to a related Web page. You can also add Web feeds (including photo feeds from Flickr) to the channel.

Inviting members

Let your friends know about your new channel! The URL of the channel is jaiku.com/channel/name where “name” is the screen name of the channel.

Channel badges

You can also add the conversation from your channel to another Web page using the Flash badges available from channel settings.

Channels are public

At this point all channels are publicly viewable and open for anyone to join. The channel administrator is able to delete entries posted to the channel. The administrator can also delete the channel.

In the future we will be adding the ability to create private channels. We appreciate your feedback, so join the #jaiku channel and share your comments and suggestions!

I was Dave Graveline’s guest on the Into Tomorrow radio show this weekend. The show’s split into three hours; the part with Dave and my conversation is about halfway into Hour 3.

The fast-moving folks at WidSets, the Nokia-backed mobile Web widget app, have announced a Jaiku widget as part of their social widget bundle. According to the Jaiku Widget download page it has already been downloaded over 40,000 times.

WidSets, which passed the 1 million registered users milestone last month, is a handset manufacturer-independent Java application that enables users to download and create widgets that deliver up to date Internet content to mobile phones.

According to Nokia, WidSets works on a wide variety of mobile phone brands and is compatible on more than 300 mobile devices. That means you can use the Jaiku widget not just on Nokia phones, but also Blackberries, Motorolas, Sony Ericssons, and other mobile devices that support Java MIDP 2.0. For a complete roundup, see the list of compatible devices.

I’ve found myself using the widget quite a bit because it is lightweight, updates automatically, and the UI is so smooth. Judging from the comments on Jaiku other Jaikees like it too. You can sign in with your Jaiku screen name and password (no API key needed).

To get it, you need to first download and install WidSets on your phone. I found that the app downloads pretty quickly (it is only 159kb in size). Point your mobile phone browser to the mobile site at get.widsets.com – or go to widsets.com/social on the Web and click “Download”.

Once you’ve downloaded the Jaiku widget and signed in to your account, you can browse the following streams:

• Overview (this is the latest from you and your contacts, identical to the Overview page on jaiku.com when you are signed in)
• Your Jaikus - Jaikus by you. Identical to same on the Web
• Explore - latest public Jaikus from everyone
• Jaiku Team - news and updates from the Jaiku team
• Jaiku Support and Ideas channel - latest posts to the support channel
• Devku channel - Jaiku developer channel. New 3rd-party applications tend to be posted here first
• TWiT channel - the backchannel for the popular This Week in Tech netcast by Leo Laporte and friends.

To post a new Jaiku to your stream, select Options -> Post a Jaiku. To set your location, select Options -> Set Location.

The widget has some nice details: for instance, it displays the Jaiku icons and Flickr photo thumbnails. You can also set the phone to beep when a new Jaiku is received.

The most important feature, however, is the broadening of the range of handsets for which there is now a slick, usable Jaiku client.

I’m already looking forward to next releases of this widget. The top 3 features on my wishlist are support for commenting, posting to channels, and browsing contacts.

Keep up the great work, Nokia!

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.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on the APIs but you can already check out the developer site at devku.org.

There are a couple of cool projects already out for Mac OSX. Jaiku Growler allows you to receive alerts from Growl whenever you or any of your Jaiku contacts post a new Jaiku. There’s also a Quicksilver script that lets you post Jaikus directly from Quicksilver.

Happy Easter everyone!