Dan’s Blog (2.0)

This weekend, I was sending out a Jaiku message (or updating my presence, depending on how you think of it) during a brief lull at the playground with my kids. There I was, in the middle of Highgate Wood in north London, and I realized something: Jaiku knew where I was. In fact, it had k known where I was all day as I went from East Finchley to Muswell Hill, then back to East Finchley and then to Highgate Wood. As I had briefly updated my presence in each location, it had attached my location information. Big deal, you might say, so what? Yes, but it’s the kind of location that Jaiku was tracking that started to intrigue me. Locaiton to Jaiku is not a GPS coordinate but is tracked entirely by Cell ID. If I travel somewhere new and set my location (as I did in “Vodafone HQ” today, for example) it remembers this, not by X, Y coordinate but simply by the text that I’ve entered. This way of thinking about location actually maps much more accurately on to the way that real people think about location. When you tell your friend where to meet you for a drink after work, you don’t say “meet me at lat xxx, long xxx plus/minus 30 meters.” You say “meet me at such-and-such pub.” In fact, this kind of casual location is most suited towards social applications like Jaiku. Different social groups might call the same location by different names. This is bcause location is a social construct. Sure, you can measure location against strict x,y coordinates and for some applications this is fine, not for applications like Jaiku. Even GPS direction finding applications need to map x,y coordinates into a human-consumable form of street names and landmarks (”turn left at the next intersection.”) So for apps like Jaiku and Plazes (and social media sharing such as Zonetag), cell-id based location is actually ideal. It doesn’t require additional battery, it maps very closely onto the granularity that people care about in this sort of social app, and it’s free.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:40 under mobile 2.0
Tags: jaiku, mobile2.0

5 Comments

So while I was kicking around in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island last week, I was delighted to have been able to meet up with my good friend (and Mobile Monday London Irregular) Margaret Gold. Turns out Margaret was in town for the weekend for her parents’ anniversary. It was a true “Jaiku moment” - a completely unplanned meet-up that only happened because I had written about my itinerary on Jaiku. Now, social networking services can often result in serendipitous events in the real world, but the mobile-focused nature of Jaiku (the fact, in this case, that I could keep a continuous Jaiku thread going through my trip using only my Nokia N73) and the tendency of mobile social services to focus on location and proximity tend to accentuate this feature. There’s also a lesson to learn about privacy here. In the past, it’s been quite taboo to reval publicly that you’re going to be away from home (someone might break into your house!) But social media like Jaiku (or Facebook or whatever) changes our perception of what information should be private and public. In this case, disclosing private information into the public sphere led to a meeting with a good friend and some good discussion. Was that worth the potential risk of disclosing this private information? I think it was.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 13:25 under Web 2.0, mobile 2.0
Tags: jaiku, PEI

No Comments

I posted a brief review of Jaiku’s mobile site at Mobile Web Review. Hop over to Betavine to check it out.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:55 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: Betavine, jaiku, mobile2.0

No Comments

One of the best presentations at the Essential Web event I participated in on Wednesday was from Jaiku. I downloaded the client onto my N73 while the guy was talking and had it up and running in minutes (Ok — I had to sign in using the regular S-60 browser — I should have been able to create an account using the client — but it was still a pretty good experience). The service is somewhat like twitter (”microblogging” as their founder, Jyri, describes it). But the client on S-60 does something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now — it brings presence to your existing address book. For those contacts who are also Jaiku buddies, you can see their latest jaiku line underneath their name and then drill down and find out additional presence info (like if they are in a meeting or whatever). Very very cool.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:24 under Mobility, mobile 2.0
Tags: essentialweb, jaiku

1 Comment