Jaikido Blog

Today we’ve released a new, much better way to browse and manage your connections to other people on Jaiku.

In response to many user requests, we’ve added a way to easily check who’s following you. In other words, you can now find out the truth about how popular you really are…

And should you so desire, you can now easily reciprocate by adding your followers as your contacts with one click.

Also, as part of the overhaul, we’ve renamed the ‘Contacts’ section to ‘People’, so everyone can find it easily, and to reflect the broader range of connections you can now manage there.

Last but not least, we’ve added a new feature called ‘People you might know’. It is a list of the newly joined members that people you follow have added as their contacts. This is a great way to find real-life friends to connect with on Jaiku, so we encourage you to go take a look and try it out.

As a quick recap, the main features of the release are as follows:

• “Contacts” section is now titled “People”
• An easy-to-manage list of your contacts
• A list of your followers
• New people on Jaiku that you might know

…So get in there, and find out who loves you that you’ve been missing for all this time!

After the introduction of our IM interface to Jaiku last week, we received a lot of valuable user feedback. Ralph put in some extra hours, and today we’re introducing a few important improvements.

Firstly, we’ve simplified the activation. You can now just add jaiku@jaiku.com to your buddy list using your desktop IM application, and send the IM message “SIGN IN <screenname> <password>” to log in to your Jaiku account.

You can also create a new Jaiku account by sending the message “SIGN UP <desired username>”. The bot will generate a password for you, and you’re set to go.

Secondly, you can now easily sign out of your Jaiku account and sign in as a different user. To do so, just send “SIGN OUT” and you’re ready to sign in with a different identity.

If you accidentally created a new Jaiku account, you can delete it with the command “DELETE ME”. (We’ve added a confirmation step that asks you to send “DELETE ME” once more to prevent mistakes).

Thanks to everyone who took the time to send us suggestions and feedback!

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.

It’s a videotastic day!

Jyri got videoed on stage at MobileMondayAmsterdam while talking about The Future of Participatory Media (he didn’t know he was on camera apparently, so I’m under strict instruction to not pick on him… too much).

If you’re mono-lingual like me, don’t be put off by the page not being in english - Jyri’s presentation is. You can follow along with the slides as well, they’re a bit easier to see than the on camera versions.

Jyri then went on from Amsterdam to London, where he was caught on camera again, talking about Jaiku again. Anyone would think he founded the company or something…

Have you captured video of one of our founders in the wild? Tell us where it is!

There’s been a great wee crop of Jaiku related videos recently.

First up, there’s Lifestreaming with my friends by Jonathan Greene. There’s a bit of a read there before the video, but it’s well worth it. I was rather amused to see my comment about timezones popping up there - great timing, I must say.

Now, that’s our closed Beta client - so not everyone has access to it yet. We’re still ironing out the last of the bugs before unleashing it on the world at large.

I’m reliably informed that there’s going to be some discussion about our S60 client at Supernova - if you’re lucky enough to be there, you might like to keep an eye out for it.

Secondly, there’s this video on how to add a Jaiku Widset. I have an S60 phone, so mostly I use our native S60 app, but I’ve gotta say, these Widsets are really impressive, and with over 45,000 downloads, apparently I’m not the only person that thinks so. Even Nokia’s paying attention, I think the folk over at Widsets have a winner on their hands.

I’m sure there are more great Jaiku videos out there - if you make one, or stumble across one, why not leave us a comment here to let us know?