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.

I think i might have figured out why i don't like Twiter

So at the day job we have finally got more than 50 people signed up for Yammer, and with that number of people the activity has started to get interesting.
This caused a slight parting of the clouds/light bulb moment about why i have struggled with Twitter and why i don't really like it.

The Yammer web interface will show threads (if people use the reply option!), bubbles active threads to the top (like Rejaw), reasonable clients (web, Adobe Air desktop client, SMS, IM...) that offer multiple ways to post, self made groups AND daily summary emails.
If all this sounds rather familiar, it should, this is the feature list of Jaiku (without the presence stuff, but normally you have some form of IM client to do that).

So why do both Yammer and Jaiku work so much better for me?

Well, it finally occured to me that, what i like about this is that i can add my thoughts/comments at a time that is convient for me, and i don't have to be online ALL the time, and can actually do the tasks that the company gives me money to do.

The real-time nature of Twitter might be useful for some, but it fails spectacularly as i see it, because Twitter has no "do not disturb" option like a true IM client does (other than closing the client).

Another post on the subject of Thoughts on Mircoblogging

Another slightly long one.

So some of this post has been sitting in the "queue" of ideas fermenting away, and then over the past couple of days a minor flurry of activity was kicked off, that prompted me to finally post this. More on this "controversy" further down.

First, after some thought, here is my current view on the two oldest microblogging services:

Twitter feels more like old school blogging.
From how i see twitter, it has the same "mental model" as blogging.
Someone creates a single post, then there are some responses to that, comments == @ replies and DM == emails.
The difference is that unless you do some work (or use a range of third party tools), it is impossiblevery hard to figure what was said (the original author can figure it out i think, i am not enough of SocialMedia bigshot to have any real experience with that :)
Also Twitter, due to it's limited functionality, but existence of an API that exposes all of that functionality, has caused an eco-system to grow up around twitter. This eco-system also has a secondary effect, in that now there are not only people writing about how to use twitter but also what tools are best to use with it.

Jaiku feels more like a forum.
This is probably due to the threaded nature of the conversations.
The fact that replies can use markdown and can be longer also contributes to this feeling.
The channels also help to separate off some of the noise as well.
Another thing that helps, is that the social circles in Jaiku seem to be slightly tighter, or at least that is my experience. For me this shows up as the same names showing up in threads, even though i am not following that particular person, so i can take a longer time getting to "know" them before following/friending them.

now about what inspired me actually do something with the ideas written above:

Ville Vesterinen put up a post on the Arctic Startup blog, where he outlines his idea that he will be spending more time on Twitter as the majority of the people he met at LeWeb08 were on twitter, and he thinks that he will get more from using that as his primary tool.
This caused a bit of a stir on Jaiku (along with a slight uptick in the number of Finns registered on Twitter i would guess).
Ville, to give him credit, follows this up with a second post and third post about the responses.

Possibly as a response to this (and also due to the general rumblings on #jaiku) Jyri announces in a blog post his understanding of some of the future plans for Jaiku.
Interestingly he also posts it to both Jaiku and twitter.

One of the hightlights of this was the comedy moment when this jaiku thread started up in response twitter post by one of Jaiku's more prolific contributers

Another highlight was @Spongefile's comment here

Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.

Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.

which i think has to be just about the best description/comparison of the two services i have seen in a while.
And also ties in with one of my all time favorite Merlin Mann quotes here

Just one reason i like hanging out on Jaiku

So i check my Jaiku stream this morning and i see this post as shown below

The comment does not seem to relate to the original Jaiku at all!

So i click through and look at the original thread, and suddenly everything become clear

Hierarchy of Communication

Once again, the almost ever happy James Whatley, has posted something that was in my "should post something about this idea" queue, before i manage to get my post out. So in response to that, i have mostly tied up my thoughts and here it is.

I had been thinking about this (but from a slightly different point of view), as i had been rather busy on multiple projects at my job recently. So busy in fact, that i got to mostly dictate the communication methods other people could use (which in fact turned out to be email only).

For me, i think of the various ways that other people send information towards me in a hierarchy of increasing order of interruption (something like):
Social network/microblogging
email
IM
SMS
Phone call
Face to Face meeting

Digging a little deeper into these,
- Microblogging or social networks
they have an "ambient intimacy" idea going for them == i check in when I have time
- Email
I can check this when i get a short break in the day i.e. 2-3 times per day.
- IM
pops-up on your screen, but can be ignored until you are ready to deal with it (or you can set your presence to be do not disturb or away if you need quite/thinking time)
- SMS
again it can be ignored, but is not usually. For me, this is probably my preferred method of communication (low interruption, little expectation of response, i can respond on my schedule if needed, etc.)
In fact, i have found that in Finland SMS is actually a very valid method of business communication.
- phone call
I need to be almost 100% focused for the duration of the call, with conference calls at least i find i can do small "tidying" type tasks (sort out inbox, desktop or temp directories etc.).
To a certain extent i also use the "divert to voice mail" to judge how important the call was (if they leave a voicemail, it was important!).
- Face to Face meeting
The most expensive in terms of interrupting me or stopping me doing something else productive, due to the fact that as well as the duration of the actual event, there is some period of time before and after the meeting where there is not much else i can do because i am focused on the meeting.

Now in terms of the volume of information that is transferred, for the interruption of time, i see it as something like;
Email is best (least intrusive, most information), face to face gives good value as you can draw pictures etc., SMS, phone call, im and microblogging brings up the rear (filtering out the noise from all of the status Updates can be a relatively major task)

Services like Spinvox would probably help me by moving phone calls further down my interruption hierarchy. In fact judging by my current phone behaviour, i might even just leave the phone in "silent" mode and never answer it again.

Getting back to why i was thinking about blogging this, was that i have seen that unlike James' pictures, I don't see the other half of the picture as normally a mirror. From what i have experienced, the order changes slightly, or some options are not even there.
Like most assumptions, this thinking that the other person likes to be contacted in the same way can cause dis-connects and friction.

EDIT: Follwing on from @whatleydude's comment/request, i created a diagram that sort of summs it up.

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.

how to get your Dopplr trips to feed into Jaiku

been meaning to look to get this working for a while now, and finally figured out how to do it this evening.

turns out it is really simple.

In Dopplr go to the "Your Journal" tab, and then select "show just your trips option".
This will give an RSS feed (actually it seems to be an ATOM feed) with an entry for every trip start and return.