There are certainly no shortage of social networks at the moment, but I’ve found a nice home on Jaiku. There are some similarities with Jaiku and Twitter, but once you start to dive into Jaiku, you’ll note that the similarities remain at the surface.
When you visit either the main Jaiku page or a user’s page, you’ll see their availability, location, feeds, friends and a presence or “life” stream. Aside from simply posting a quick snippet on your status you can included feeds from any other source with an ATOM or RSS feed. In my case, I’ve got bookmarks, photos, videos and songs – all automatically posting to my page and informing my friends. This can turn into far more than you might want to be tracking from friends and contacts and Jaiku has also make it very easy to simply remove those updates from your contact’s flow. Jaiku offers a Symbian (S60v3) client and recently released a Widset for J2ME complient devices. Both are quite nice and elegant visually though the Widset offers a great deal more from the Jaiku website – like Channels which I hope will make it into the Mobile client. The Widset also offers a way to comment which is currently lacking in the release version though that should be resolved when the new update comes out next month.
I’ve been testing the Jaiku mobile beta for S60 3rd Edition devices for the past few days and while it’s still definitely a beta product, there are substantial advances here that make Jaiku an even richer experience. Instead of walking you through in words or even a screen-shot tour, I though I’d show you with video…
Before I started using this version of the client, I was only looking for a way to post, but the team has pushed things well beyond that “simple” request and enabled fully threaded discussion tracking. There’s no active notification (sound) yet, but it’s easy to see not only when there’s an update from a friend, but even how mnay have ben posted on a particular thread. You can also surf through an individual contact’s stream or if you prefer browse through your own with friends, which will show you everything that’s happening.
You can reply at any point to any comment or thread which is a killer detail. This enables Jaiku to be a fully interactive experience between participants. Jaiku has been intelligently managing threads and comments on the web, but having this level of control in the palm of your hand completes the experience.
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Jaiku, N-Series, N95, s60v3, S60v3 FP1, Social Networking, Twitter, Widsets
I’ve really been digging Jaiku for the last few months, and I don’t understand why more users haven’t switched off from Twitter yet.
It’s got to be just a matter of time. Jaiku is like Twitter Pro – which I read last night on Eric Rice’s blog … http://www.ericrice.com/blog/?page_id=415
May I ask what version of the Jaiku client? I am using v. 0.49 (just downloaded via the link provided by SMS from Jaiku) with my E61i. The interface is different from (and inferior to, imo) the one demonstrated in your video.
I’m in the private beta… the release should be sometime in July I believe. There’s a MASSIVE improvement in what I am showing here from what is currently public.
Excellent presentation. I love how all these services are progressing. Just when you things were going stale.
When Twitter blew up (in popularity) a few months ago and then blew up (literally) and everyone started defecting to Jaiku, I resisted. It looked cool, but was…too much. It ran counter to the whole notion of simplicity which is the whole point of Twitter. But this beta looks pretty sweet. I’ll have to give it a whirl. Thanks for the sneak peek.
Greg – You’ll love it. If you have a Symbian S60v3 device you’ll get this in about a month I think. Otherwise I think you’ll be with the Widset which should work on J2ME compliant mobiles.
Thanks for the feedback! Jonathan’s video is über-cool, especially when combined with the three-part comprehensive article series by Ken Camp (here is the first part).
WidSets Jaiku client (widget) is also a great addition to the list of Jaiku-enabled mobile clients, since it is robust, easy to use, and works with over 300 handset models. I just discussed with the WidSets people about their roadmap, and it seems that the Jaiku widget will benefit a lot from their future functionality; in addition, in the future our API enables them, and the other 3rd-parties, to access almost the full Jaiku functionality.
Petteri –
There’s some great excitement building for Jaiku thanks to the development of you and the team. The service has really matured and the new mobile access points enable people to be connected in a very controlled way which is just great.
Now that looks pretty neat :)! Looking forward to having it on my S60 device…
One question though…is there a WiFi connectivity option in the new beta? I personally think it might be something (the lack of it), that scared people away form the first releases…
You can choose how you want Jaiku to connect, though unless you are always within range of WiFi it won’t work unless you run it on-demand – though perhaps that is your point. Assuming you are afraid of data charges. Think I saw somewhere that they estimate around 20-30MB /mo of data for an average list of friends…
Great presentation of what this very cool software is all about. i’ve been using it on a 6600 for a few days now. It’s a little slow on this phone, but still very interesting. i like the idea of a live forum of friends or colleagues having a common mobile repository for notes and whatnot. I’d like to see a way to turn off its automatic bluetooth activation. The widset looks great, bogs down this older S60 phone though. Is the correct pronounciation with the j? for some reason i assumed it ws ‘haiku’? hmmmm.
Thanks!
I believe the J is pronounced, but perhaps our Finnish friends might chime back in there…
I think you can turn bluetooth scanning off. I leave it on even though I am 99.9% sure I won’t see anyone just yet… someday soon though I hope!
It’s been confirmed by me and others in the beta that there is currently no Wifi option …
In Finnish the J would be pronounced, but not the way you say it. It would be more like.. hmm.. I guess yiku (similar to the way you pronounce YI in YIkes :)). Actually, in Finnish “kaiku” = echo, and “joiku” is the traditional singing of the indigenous Sami people living in Lapland in Finland, Sweden, Norway and bit of Russia (the singing sounds remotely like some of the native Indian singing here in the USA). So “Jaiku” to me seems/sounds like play with those two words.. Perhaps Petteri can tell us whether I am completely off the mark. 🙂
Hi Jonathan,
Great video – really like your stuff.
Quick question from a fellow N95 user – in your video you flick from the S60v3 beta client to the Widset client of Jaiku (of which I’m a big fan by the way – mind if I add you?)
I know this is gonna sound SO mental – but when you change applications you hold down the menu key and the right of your screen displays your current memory status!
And you also manually find the app by searching ‘w’. Fantastic!
How does your phone do this? When I hold mine I only get the list of active apps appear on the right – do you have a certain kind of firmware?
Would love to know,
Thanks,
James.
(apologies if it’s SO obvious)
Keep up the good work.
There was some discussion around how to pronounce Jaiku here.
Maybe we should have adopted the Finnish pronounciation? Maybe it would be cool in the same way as “Kompressor” in some Mercedes models? 🙂
The app that I use is called HandyTaskman and it lets you view current and recent apps as well as launch things by simply starting to type in a name. It’s made by Epocware – http://www.epocware.com
Fantastic.
Thanks Jonathan.
Installing it now…
;o)
Hi Jonathan,
This video is really cool ! thnx for making it.
Rajan
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