Jaikido Blog

It is not even 2007 yet, but we decided to take a huge risk and already name Peter Rukavina the Unofficial Jaiku Member of the Year (UJMotY). In addition to reporting a number of bugs and suggesting a lot of improvements to the service, he has implemented a cool experimental Jaiku client for OSX. Take a look at it here.

Note that we haven’t yet opened any official APIs, but we plan to do so early next year. If you are a developer interested in playing around with Jaiku (either the Web service or the mobile client), don’t hesitate to contact us for example by emailing me at petteri at jaiku.com. We will provide early access to the APIs to the first interested ones.

… and the result is a nice article in International Herald Tribune.

The article includes comments from Nokia’s Mikko Pilkama, who thinks context-awareness is the next logical development step for mobile phones. In the end of the article, Danah Boyd cuts through the hype :) and argues that “An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond.” In addition, she highlights the risks of becoming addicted to stalking friends or old lovers.

What do you think? Have we opened Pandora’s Box or has Jaiku the potential to truly bring people closer to each other?

For a reason that is being investigated, the DNS server of our hosting partner started to point to a wrong address and the web servers connected to our old presence server. The problem is now fixed. We are sorry about the couple of hours’ break (that took much too long!)

Now that the launch is safely behind us and the Jaiku community is growing steadily, it is time to ask for feedback: What is your initial feeling about the service? How are you using it? Is something preventing you from using it? What is good/bad/ugly? And, especially, what would you like us to implement in the near future?

I do not want to spoil the fun by telling too much about our plans before hearing your initial feedback. However, we can already tell that since our Symbian Research & Development Division (SRDD) is slightly under-resourced (i.e. the lads are travelling :-) during the next few weeks, we will first focus on improving the Web site and implementing features that can be used without an S60 handset. In addition, we will make the installation process much simpler and port the client to the Symbian 3rd Edition (Nokia N80, E70 & Co). The deadline for the latter is still not fixed, but it is definitely high on our list.

You have posted extremely valuable blog comments and emails to bugs [at] jaiku.com. This was the key reason for us to release the service at such an early stage, so please keep them coming!