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!