some hints and tips for new Jaiku users

With Jaiku now moving to unlimited invites for everyone, over the weekend i dropped a ton of invites over on Jaiku Invites (and it seems a fair number of other people did the same)
This resulted in a mini-flood of new users on Jaiku, and i could see a need for something like this. Please bear in mind that these are my opinions, and as far as i can tell there are no official etiquette rules on Jaiku, just a bunch of friendly people.

• read the help pages


• One of the original purposes of Jaiku was to help prevent the two most common questions when starting a mobile phone conversation; where are you, are you free to talk


this means there are a couple of things that people can miss if they are not using the mobile client


• Jaiku is a presence application - shows the in use profile of your phone (silent, vibrate, general)


• location updates. This is done by cell-tower, so you can name places (if you are the first Jaiku user there), so pick a good name (not home, office etc!)


• think about joining some channels that interest you


• #jaiku is a good one :)


• use the search box (on your home page) to find people of channels that you might be interested in


• add your feeds from things like; your blog, LastFM, del.icio.us, flikr, Dopplr etc. to your profile


• FriendFeed & Twitter - no so useful


• use JaikuBook to get your Jaiku's to be used as your facebook status


• this is only your main Jaiku's, not comments or feeds


• feel free to post comments on anything


• use comments, rather than creating new Jaiku's
• from this thread you can see who will see your comments (so no need to create a new Jaiku using the twitter @ syntax!)


• If you are not interested in someone's feeds, you can unsubscribe from just that feed


• you can also unsubscribe from their Jaiku's, but as long as you are following them, you sill still see any comments they make


• there is no need to "block" followers, just stop following them yourself


• to get a "new line" in comments, you need to place a blank line in the comments box


• clever use of "ku" suffix is encoraged


• hence things like; meetku's, jog-ku's...


• if you are looking at a Jaiku of Somones feed, and there is a link which says something like "and 5 more", if you click that link, the "5 more" appear in a box on the left where the google adds normally appear

Some things that are known bugs/features/problems:

• there is no equivalent to Twitter's direct message


• everything in Jaiku is public and we like it that way


• use IM or email, they were designed for that task




• only 12 channels will display in your manage page


• The Jaiku development team is still quite small and is concentrating on the port to Google App Engine


• the mobile (S60) client is a bit old and does not support channels


• realistically, we need to wait for the port to be complete before the team looks at new release


• There is no iPhone client currently, but the recent iPhone DevCamp was looking into this


• use the #wishku channel to ask for features, BUT read it first to see if it has already een asked for

In this post, @acuk gives some good tips on how to gain more followers.
Basically, commeting on other peoples posts will bring you to the attention of other people who might then start following you.
Also, some poeple will follow you if you ofllow them, others will look at your home page, and then decide if they want to follow you.