A Few Weeks of Jaiku Fun
I’ve been playing around with Jaiku for a bit now. I first downloaded the client and gave it a spin a while back (before the site was there). When they launched the site, I reinstalled the client, and after some initial screwing around with my N70, I got it to work. I should note, however that Jaiku has become great fun even if you don’t have a S60 phone.
Thanks to the enthusiastic use of colleagues Tom and Edgar I’ve gotten a taste of what the service would be like if all my (non-techie) friends would be online. Especially Edgar’s regular updates during his vacation in Australia were… interesting. I’m still not sure if I enjoy seeing his “having a cocktail here and there” updates while I’m posting a message that I’m hard at work. Oh well.
I first encountered (the concept of) Jaiku at last year’s Reboot thanks to Jyri’s talk. The talk was cool, and mainly focussed on how IM-like status messages integrated with your phone book would result in something Jyri and friends like to call ‘rich presence’. It seems that (as is so often the case) real use by real users, combined with the introduction of the web front-end is slowly but surely transforming it into something more like a personal presence publishing channel.
I find myself regularly updating my status message, be it through the S60 client, their text messaging interface or the web site. I’ve also hooked up most of the RSS feeds that track my activity on a number of social web services. This might just be my obsessive urge to cache all my (on- and offline) activity somewhere in an effortless way, but I can imagine more people would enjoy using it once tying together the loose ends becomes more intuitive.
I would also like to thank the Jaiku guys for being very helpful, supporting me with all the N70 woes.
For those interested in more, check out the following links:
- An article on Jaiku in the Herald Tribune
- The Jaiku FAQ
- Reboot adept Peter Rukavina’s Jaiku PHP class, Mac OS X GUI for updating your presence and Adium integration script
- Mika’s Merkitys-Meaning (the cooles Flickr uploader for S60) is unofficially included in Jaiku
Finally, if you happen to be using the service and would like to hook up, my nick is ‘kaeru’. Let me know yours!
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