June 21st, 2007
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.
June 18th, 2007
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!
June 18th, 2007
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?
June 13th, 2007
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.
June 12th, 2007
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:
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!
May 24th, 2007
Snuck a couple small features in over the last couple days that we thought we might point out:
First, pagination has changed a little, changing from a list of page numbers to just older/newer links. This change will make some minor speed improvements but may not be the final decision so you are invited to give feedback. Also, by popular request, pagination was added to the overview page.
Second, in the list of feeds related to your Jaiku stream you will notice some have become links. As we get new updates from feeds we’ve also begun recording the url that the feed points to. They are only updated when there is actually new content pulled from the site so you may want to update something in a feed if you notice a link is missing.
May 22nd, 2007
We see quite a few questions from people asking about why their feed hasn’t updated or is slow to update (we’re working on speeding it up) so we thought we’d give everyone a little heads up on how it is all working and how we are working to speed it up.
The common case is that we will update anything more than 30 minutes old, we don’t have a per-feed setting for update frequency at the moment, though we’d like one.
We grab a certain number of the items that haven’t been updated the longest and add them to a queue for processing.
A couple services requested that we poll less frequently so we don’t query any feeds from their servers more than once every minute — if we run into one of them that has happening too fast it gets kicked back in the queue for a bit. Unfortunately, there are only 1440 minutes in a day so this obviously doesn’t scale, we are interested in finding ways to alleviate this so that users of these services can have a better experience on Jaiku.
Download the streams, find out if there are updates, add them to the site. The tricky part is again related to scale, we can only process so many of these every minute and unfortunately (well, a bit fortunately for us) we have quite more than enough users who have feeds becoming due to be updated every minute than we can actually run through in a minute, this means it can take more than the desired 30 minutes to update the feed.
Solutions to the update frequency problems will be adding more servers and bandwidth to the mix, which we are actively doing, so it will become more timely as we try to keep up with new users and their feeds.
Hope that helped explain some things for people.
May 15th, 2007
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!
May 12th, 2007
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.
May 11th, 2007
Yikes, our apologies for neglecting our blog for so long, we’ve been distracted with making things faster and stronger and adding new features…
… but enough about us, go check out all the cool stuff that the community has been making, we’ve got all kinds of projects with support for Jaiku now over at http://devku.org/projects.
To keep up to date on the developments on these projects and the state of the API and even feature request stuff you can join the devku channel on Jaiku.