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.

update on 100 press-ups challenge

So i stumbled across someone else doing the "One Hundred Push Up Challenge" on Jaiku.
Seems they have quite a number of their company has also started.

This lead me to finding a new channel - http://jaiku.com/channel/hundredpushups
This is important to me, as i use Jaiku as my Facebook status update via the rather good Jaikubook application.
What this means in practice is that i think twice about what i post as my main Jaiku, but i am very free with posts to channels and comments.

It then occured to me that once again, somthing that is obvious to me, might be useful for someone else.
As a long time PDA user, it was obvious to me that there must be some sort of "countdown" app out there.
Sure enough some searching later and i came up with this Stopwatch/time application
Much easier than staring at the second hand on my watch.

As to progress, i have gone back to Week 3, but this time doing column 2 instead.
On day 2 i missed the final set by 3 or 4, but yesterdays set was a bit of a disaster.
Oh well, onto week 4

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.

What makes Jaiku so good...

So during the recent downtime, that saw Jaiku move from a datacenter in Finland to the Google App Engine, i tried out Rejaw.

While there, there was a conversation, and the feature list of Jaiku came out.

Thinking about it, here are the features (in an approximate priority order), that keep me coming back to Jaiku (appart from the people);

• Mobile client
  
• threaded replies (with no character limit on replies, only on initial post)
• Channels
• does the Lifestreaming feed thing
• Post via SMS
• IM interface
• API

BarCampHelsinki2 is GO

So Fjord have once again said that a semi-random group of people could descend on their office for a Saturday of intense conversations, demos and ideas.

More details at the Wiki, go there and update it.

Progress towards 100 pressups

So a little over 3 and half weeks ago, i came across this site one hundred pushups, and thought, that sounds like a good idea.

So i take the first test (this was on a Tuesday), and according to that i should be doing column 3. So i try that on the Wednesday, and it was rather hard to say the least, but i managed it.
I then try the second day on the Friday, and complete fail. I barely manage to do the number as per the first column, and i am in a world of pain, so obviously something is wrong then.

The following week, i decide that i will try column two instead (and as per the site advice, do it on Monday, Wednesday and Friday).
Much better, i can do the recommended numbers and still move afterwards.
Onto week two of the program, and it is all looking good, well, apart from i am on holiday at the family mökki, so some of the day's get moved round a bit.
I had written down the numbers as i had also taken the monday off, and i thought they looked too big, so instead of doing that, i repeated week2's numbers but moved to column 3 instead.

On returning to the city i, re-read the site and realized my mistake.
I had not taken the new test that i was supposed to do at the end of week 2, bit late to change now (or rather i could but it would make tracking things harder), so i continue with doing week 2 again but this time using column 3's numbers.

So this last weekend i did the test and managed 21 press-ups, so that should put me in colum 2 again, but having learnt from my mistake last time, i decided to do column 1.
And glad i did. I managed to do the sets (the last couple of press-ups were really boarderline good form, but...), and i did not manage to reach the minimum for the final set.

Looks like i will be repeating weeks 3&4, so this is going to take just a little longer than 6 weeks ;)

And, the reason for posting here; lifehack, post your fitness or weightloss plan on the web, and you are more likley to do it.
so expect more in this series of posts

BarCampHelsinki - My notes form an exciting day

This post has been sitting in my TODO for far too long.

First of all, thanks to Fjord for the use of their space. It was a really good space to have this type of event; good WiFi coverage, plenty of power points, Interesting things (asus eee pc, olpc), large boards to write on (and enough space for everyone to sit)

Only thing to remember for next time is that the entrance to their office is a little tricky to find (it is sort of "round the back")
An interesting and diverse group of people came. During the round table introduction there almost seemed to be a "i'm the least technical person here" competition happening :)

The organising of the days agenda went rather smoothly (enough topics had been proposed etc).
Here Antti live posted the agenda as it was made

First there was a split into two rooms as there seemed to be enough content for two tracks (one more technical than the other).

The Microformats session i did not attend.

Antti gave an overview of how he does GTD here is a thread discussing the tools he uses (these were some of the notes i lost)

Although there was a plan to have two tracks it seemed everyone wanted to listen to Petri's session, so that's what we did.
So now the day moved back to a single track, to me this is one of the cool things about BarCamp type activities, the attendees decide what will happen.

Open organizing and wikis by Petri
Yochai Benkler - commons based peer production Too much content for me to take notes (but lots of really important ideas)
@Pe3 contacts have devloped "think tank" culture - micro-contributions Parvi.fi (swarm). Reasearch swarm started in jaiku #tutkimusparvi
Science is not open. End result is open, but process is closed. Experiment in what happens if done in an open way. Need all of mediaWiki to be "localised" before getting full status Wikiversity (wikiopisto) creating "learning prcesses" not "learning materials" Avoin.org - 3 guys writing their phd's Jornalisim is changing - what is it.
link
the revcommended book

Scred by Kris
Billmonk vs scred Cool conerversation "bit" between Peter (a bill monk user) and Kris.
Peter & friends started to build a "debt" tool, but realised that more complicated than first thought.
Why not change; took long enough to get friends onto billmonk -> export tool by built by Scred.
Scred has mobile client that syncs nicely

A short break for lunch (that then extended :)

Tcl session by Kris
Everything is a string
Mature language
Kris gave some examples of why TCL is so cool for a developer.
Developers should remeber that there is a really easy to embed version for your projects.
TCL homepage

Location Based Services by me
Links to sites mentioned:
jaiku - found out in the beer session afterwards, people had not realized that if they have S60 client they can name locations (based on cell towers)
brightkite - US based, Send location to site. Sort of not very good copy of Jaiku location functionality.
locatik.com - not sure of the point of this, but it is in beta (need a GPS enabled S60 phone to take part).
Nokia Sports Tracker - Speed distance maonitoring using the inbuilt GPS of an S60 phone
Nokia Maps - free maps for S60 phones
During discussion, extra site plazes brought up, but no-longer has mobile client, what is the point of it?
interesting discussion comparing Nike sports Vs Nokia Sports Tracker

Systems logic in design by melanie
Explanation/demo of this technique - Common Needs, Context Needs, Context needs, Qualifier needs,
Examples of how to use this technique for Nokia N770 and Wonderbra
Demo of how this applies to advertising (at least i learnt a new thing that wonderbra has a product for "fuller figure" women!) compare&contrast this to French 1970 playtex bra advert.
Really good presentation/session by Melanie (especailly as idea for seesion was only thought of approx 2 hours before session!)

Internationalization / Localization by
Simple 4/5 slide presentation outlining points
Do it now, if not web 2.0 services are too easy to replicate
Formats & localisation (only USA has states, etc)
Google fail * detects ip - causes fail if using proxy from some other country (not too bad for home page, but other serives become hard to use :) * ff - point by Patrik Hirvinen * not using selected location - try searching using Google.de in finland gives results as if searching in FI = FAIL!
Much bigger problem because customer support is most important thing

Hopefully there will be more events like this in the future.

Recent mobile developments

Over the past couple of weeks there have been some rather major announcements in the mobile phone space (something someone living in Finland tends to be interested in!), and rather than a this set of thoughts just turning into another "those guys said it better" type post in a couple of months, here it is (in all of it's <> glory)

iPhone 3G -
Not much from hardware point of view (3G & GPS). The benefit of this (as i see it) is that the first generation owners don't feel so left out in the cold, it also allows those people who need to upgrade a possibility to sell on their first generation phones (as there will be some sort of market for those).

Really it was all about the software (latest AllAboutSymbian podcast noticed this) - for instance the inbuilt calculator making use of rotation, finally something other than the gallery and movie viewer app
New development tools are supposed to be really easy to use (drag & drop development, just how realistic is this?)
Enterprise stuff - Cisco VPN client built in & working
Apple tends to release small improvements to it's hardware platforms (at least since i have been watching them recently over the past 3-5 years), but keep supporting previous platforms (within limits of the hardware), everyone else seems to forget the old devices.
This gives you a slight feeling of confidence when buying the hardware, as you know at least next couple of releases of software will run on it.
I have seen quotes floating around the web that the life span of Apple hardware is approximately 5 years (with some form of updated hardware being bought sooner than that and the old hardware being kept on for occasional or emergency use)

Nokia E71 -
Saw the announcement of this and, WOW, shame about the camera (crappy optics apparently) but VERY low cost for the hardware you are receiving.
Reviews:
My-Symbian.com review
AllAboutSymbian Review
AllAboutsymbian multimedia review (in this one there is a quote about QVGA video at 15 fps, which looks wrong according to the specs at Forum Nokia (the front "video call" (has anyone EVER used this functionality?) camera does low quality, while the rear "main" camera does similar to the E90 (full VGA 22 fps)) Update (2008.08.22): Seems that on the Forum Nokia page some one had forgot to edit it fully (probably after copying it from the E90 page), and the E71 only does QVGA (320*240) at 15fps. Not so good :(

Comparing the hardware specs on Forum Nokia:
E90 Vs E71,
you can see that they are almost identical (different processors, more bluetooth "things" in E71, etc).

This almost makes me regret spending approximately 900€ on an E90 last year when they came out, but not quite.
For me the giant internal screen, and the opportunity to use a top of the range device for a year was worth it (especially all the cool stuff i have learnt via Jaiku!).

Which would i buy today, I'm not sure.
These are the main "things" i would think about for each device;
iPhone = big screen, smooth user experience, but VERY walled garden,
E71 = probably excellent build quality, some interesting updates to the core S60 software, good size, but small screen
E90 = big screen, slightly better hardware specs, potential laptop replacement device but big for a phone

So for me, today (if I did not have the E90), i would probably buy the E71 and either an iTouch or an N810/N800 to do the browsing on.

Social Networks or Social Objects

I did have some thoughts on this (and in fact started to write up this post a few months back), but these guys have written about this subject much better than i can, so here are some links instead:
Jyri Engeström
Hugh Macleod
Whatleydude (his points about Social objects are further down, and have a number of good links around this.

Seth Godin also talking about "friends"