Jaikido Blog

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!

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.

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!

So it appears that some people have noticed that they gained settings for IM notifications on the user settings page. What they did not know is that we are first doing a closed beta for this much wanted feature. If you have an account on a Jabber server already (this includes Google Talk) and would like to participate in the beta, leave a comment at this post on the #devku channel. We will be adding more people to the beta group tomorrow.

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?

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.