intersting things happening around Jaiku

Checking Jaiku this morning, it seems that a couple of potentially significant things have happened over the last 24 hours.

First @lemonad puts up a post announcing that he is looking at getting the Mdot version back up and running.

And then I see @jyri's announcement of a 20% project that has the potential to solve the feed fetching problem, and thereby allow feed fetching back into Jaiku.
Check the FAQ (that is linked in the comments) for what problem this is designed to solve.

Also, by checking the #Jaikuengine channel you can stay (sort of) upto date with whats happening with the development of Jaiku.
The Bug tracker is here while there is a seperate code review tool here.

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.

been on a bit of an installing spree on my E90

Past couple of days, i have been adding some apps onto my E90, and i thought i would make a short write up about them here.

First one was Nokia Sports Tracker.
On first install, this did not look too interesting (nice icons, but i could not see what to do).
But then i thought i would see what happens if i make the ride home a "workout". It took a couple of tries to figure out how to get SportsTraker to start tracking - the trick was to sleect the "new workout" option (obvious really), then a nice screen appears with all sorts of timers and stuff on it.
When i stopped the tracking, the real magic happened. Loads of cool stats on the route (speeds, time, distances etc). There was also options to export to Google Earth and a couple of other formats.
I need to look into if it is possible to only record the route (not that interested in speed on the motorbike most of the time :).
Nice use of the in-built GPS circuits. If you want to find me on the site my username is ymb.

Then i signed up for the Beta of Locatik. Not exactly sure what is the aim of this app, but the web site is a sort of cool use of Google maps. If you want to look, you can sort of see where i am when i last updated the site ( http://www.locatik.com//ymbrads )

I then got an invite to Brightkite. Seems like a sort of not quite as good Jaiku, but for Twitter users, so it will probably be really popular in the US.

I have also updated my copy of CorePlayer, as the previous verision had a small bug in that if you were listening to something, and then had a call, it would crash the phone (at least on my e90 this was the case!).

I also finally got Conversations working. I had installed the package ages ago, but it appeared to do nothing, but today i went back to the home page, and noticed that, in fact, TWO packages need to be installed. I downloaded and installed the "Nokia Internet Services Support Package" (as per the instructions) and now it all works.
Pretty cool addition to the built-in contacts app, and apparently has some sort of threading ability or something.