This weekend, I finally took the time to check out the Jaiku microblog site that has been up since November 2006. It resembles LinkedIn a little, since it is largely based on having one’s own contacts. The idea is to show your presence data to your friends, family and other contacts, and to correspondingly let you check up on the presence of your contacts. There apparently is no way to restrict who can make themselves your contacts.
The concept of presence is broad, including not only location, and status messages such as “busy” and “at work”, but also free-form messages of up to 140 characters.
You can update your information manually, but if you have a compatible Nokia phone, there is also a Jaiku Mobile application you can use to automatically keep your presence and location up to date, as well as to snoop on what people in your phone book are doing. If you so choose, the application will also share your calendar events, and apparently even broadcast whose Bluetooth devices you have in your vicinity.
I’m not sure I’d want to automatically give out all that information about myself, and anyway, Jaiku Mobile doesn’t work with my Nokia 9300i. A more broadly compatible, Java-based version is in the making though.
In summary, Jaiku is a fun, interesting and growing service. It won’t replace a blog, but it’s probably just the ticket for sharing brief diary notes with your friends.
Post a Comment