Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 20th January 2009
9 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter Search is great, especially when you know the tricks. But what if you happened to live in a country where another microblogging service also has a large following. Most readers from Scandinavian countries will recognize this, since Jaiku is still pretty big there. You don’t want to execute those complicated search queries on multiple search engines. Allround Swedish blog company Twingly launched a solution last night.
With their brand new search engine, you can search updates in Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de (German), Bloggy.se (Swedish) and the archives of long gone Pownce. “It’s therefore”, Twingly’s Anton Johansson writes, “we call it the first federated microblog search because our goal is to indexing all microblogs from all services”.
The engine experienced some slow downs right after their launch, but is working fine now. I love the clean design and the subtle logos of the different microblogging services. Here’s how it looks like when you have results from three different services:
For those who have an instant “Where’s FriendFeed?!” reflex, the integration is on its way.
Written on 19th January 2009
14 COMMENTS
Robert Gaal, co-founder of Wakoopa
The book on Jaiku has finally been closed. At least, as far as Google is concerned. Its founders are still undecided it seems.
What Made Jaiku Great
I was a big fan of Jaiku when it launched. Somehow it provided me with some great discussion and functionality I couldn’t immediately find on Twitter. I also got a chance to meet with some of the people behind Jaiku and found them to be extremely intelligent people with a passion for social networks. Jaiku has done something unique to microblogging and online social interaction that I think goes unnoticed for the standard Twitter user. To this day there are still things where I think Twitter could learn from Jaiku. Here’s four different ways Twitter, or developers focused on Twitter, can learn from Jaiku.
1. Comment Threads
Commenting on tweets is just an @ away, but it’s far from perfect. When using an @ reply you are left out of other replies made by people you’re not following. You could use Twitter Search and try and find the whole conversation thread, but that could take you hours. Jaiku solved this with their comment system. Every Jaiku status message has it’s own comment page attached to it. To put it in the words of Jaiku founder Jyri: every status message is its own social object. Messages inside these threads weren’t constricted to 140 characters too. This allowed you to really get a meaningful debate going, as well as discover new interesting unfamiliar people popping up in these threads.
2. Channels
There’s a lot of folks on Twitter who know what a hashtag is, yet there’s still no good way of using them. For starters, you can’t click on a hashtag on the Twitter site. Jaiku had specific channels which you could join. You would be able to post a message using “#channel [your message]“, and new messages in the channel from others (even people you didn’t follow) would be posted in your stream immediately. As with comment threads, this was also very handy to discover new interesting people to follow. Clients like Tweetdeck have fixed this issue somewhat, yet there’s still no good solid concept of channels on Twitter.
3. Automated messages
Jaiku allowed you to automatically posts content from other social networks to your message stream. Like with Friendfeed, my Flickr pictures would pop up and people would comment on them right on Jaiku. People have used services like Twitterfeed to do this on Twitter for a while. However, I think it would be great if Twitter integrated this themselves. For starters, like on Jaiku, people could unsubscribe to certain automated content easily. Twitter could even make a filter for anybody who doesn’t want automated messages in their activity stream. Even if automated messages where just distinguishable from normal ones, it would be a step forward in my eyes. We want to put our other content on Twitter, so give us the tools to do this in a way that’s easy to organize and recognize.
4. Mobile Client
Jaiku’s mobile client integrated very nicely with the phones address book to show you exactly what you’re contacts have been up to and where. This allowed for some coincidental meetings which startups like Loopt and Dodgeball have been promoting all along. There’s a big opportunity to do this with Twitter, and add location to tweets at the same time. Some clients like Twinkle have already begun taking some steps in this direction, yet none have the same functionality as the Jaiku client.
Now what?
Of course, Twitter is about simplicity. The Twitter team has always been very careful to add new features. However, Twitter is also just a platform. Anybody could make a great Twitter client with these kind of functionality, maybe using the open-source Jaiku code as a base. If you feel like giving this a try, let me know on Twitter. I’m @robertgaal.
I won’t be surprised if the ghost from Jaiku would haunt us Twitter users in the future. I’ll give it a warm welcome.
Written on 17th December 2008
8 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Earlier this week Ernst-Jan virtually deadpooled Jaiku in this post titled “Finnish geeks say goodbye to their beloved Jaiku” On the Arctic Startup blog Ville Vesterinen reported that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community is abandoning Jaiku for Twitter because the feeds weren’t coming through and the SMS service had been disabled at Jaiku. All signs that Jaiku was dying.
The founder of Jaiku, Jyri Engeström, wasn’t talking either.
Now Jyri has spoken up (50 minutes ago) and gives us some details on what is happening at Google. It turns out Jaiku is not being killed at all but rather ported to Google App Engine.
Because Jyri is now treating Jaiku as a “20% project, meaning it has been getting about one day a week of my time” the development is taking longer than expected. In the mean time Jyri is spending his time mainly on the Social Graph API together with Brad Fitzpatrick.
Jyri assures us that Jaiku is still alive and kicking and we will see exciting new stuff in the future: “you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!’s in store.”
That is great, but when you realize how much time it takes to grow a start-up into a successful company, and then read that the whole project is getting no more than 20% time, I can’t help but worry.
Written on 15th December 2008
18 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For everybody whose interested in the Northern European tech scene, Arctic Startup is a great source. Of course, we cover the basics, but Antti Vilpponen and his team don’t leave any details uncovered. Oh and yeah, most of the times we grab the highlights from their blog. Yep, guilty.
No more cupcakes?
Like this one: Ville Vesterinen reports that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community slowly turns its back to the Google-owned microblogging service. He noticed a Jaiku discussion (in Finnish) where the symbolic rats jumped off the sinking ship.
Who can blame them? I hear from several sides that, just like Pownce, Jaiku had some issues which nobody resolves. Before you know it, my co-editor Zee is dancing on your grave because you didn’t listen to your users.
Vesterinen points out several painful issues: feeds aren’t coming through and the SMS service has been disabled for three days now (sounds familiar). But the major reason: you’re missing out on a whole lot of interesting conversations when ignoring Twitter.
Written on 18th November 2008
2 COMMENTS
Andrew Hyde, Startup Enthusiast, Power User of Many Things, Community Organizer
Startup tarpipe is aiming to simplify the workflow of posting on social media sites. Their API enables users to do progressive things with their content in single actions. You can upload a photo from an email, have it post to a few such as uploading a photo, announcing this action with a tweet, sending an IM to a friend and send an email (and can do so at the same time). It does this without forcing the user to install a desktop or mobile application.
Their blog highlights some of the interesting projects their product is leading to, such as extending battery life while using location based service and make EverNote do some cool things.
The big question for me is in how it will be used, and how it will differ from just creating a social media power user megaphone. I can see some people setting it up so that their Twitter, Pownce, away message, Jaiku, Flickr, Friend Feed, Tumblr and Plurk update every time they see fit, which would create an almost embarrassing echo chamber.
They are strong advocates for open source, and with their API can imagine some creative uses. Currently, I see uses that are neat (use IM to update your twitter) to useful (uploading your photos to several places) but don’t see a use of their API that absolutely shines. Yet.
Written on 10th October 2008
3 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not.
(I was trying to make this a weekly series but skipped a few weeks. You don’t mind, do you?)
So where does last year’s buzz stand now?
October 8, 2007 – Loïc Le Meur launched his new startup, a video conversation platform dubbed Seesmic, with a review on TechCrunch. (Michael Arrington later disclosed he had personally invested in the company). The company is still going strong, even made an acquisition last April with Twhirl and recently raised another $6 million round co-led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, where Le Meur is a Partner. Competitors are jumping onto the scene nowadays, examples given 12seconds, Phreadz and TokBox.
October 9, 2007 – Google acquired Jaiku, the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company. The terms of the acquisition were never disclosed. Jaiku didn’t continue to grow as much as Twitter did in terms of users and traffic, and the only posts that are being published on the Jaiku blog since the acquisition seem to be about maintenances and outages. The service was ported to the Google App Engine and moved to the search engine’s infrastructure, and they made invitations unlimited. That’s about it. As far as I’m concerned, Jaiku fell off the grid and unless Google has some major plans with it, I suspect it won’t make any headlines anymore.
October 10, 2007 – Mozilla announced they were serious about building a mobile browser. The project was given the codename “Fennec” and is still under development. Nobody really knows when Mozilla plans to release a beta version. Anyway, Fennec will face competition with IE Mobile, the iPhone and Android browser, Opera Mobile / Mini, SkyFire, etc., but based on the prototype concepts introduced last June, it looks like it might just be a worthy one.
Written on 18th August 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Thursday, European Twitterazi experienced a bad start of the day. Their beloved micro blogging service would no longer send SMS updates. Smart phone users can still find ways to receive updates about Twitter conversations. Yet people with less sophisticated mobile devices are in the dark now.
My co-editor Patrick suggested that Twitter should offer a pro-account option, so that people would have to pay for SMS updates. But co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog that he didn’t share this opinion:
International billing is a significant project and not something we are comfortable focusing on before we have a dependable offering. It’s not right to charge for spotty service—and we know there are bugs.
How to get SMS text messages updates
Although Twitter still sends updates to 96 percent of its users, the remaining 4 percent is pretty pissed of. Especially in the UK, Twitter users are quite angry. Read for example the comments on this TechCrunch UK post.
The first commenter on the Techcrunch UK post was Paul Bradshaw from Online Journalism Blog. He called it a “stupid move” and was “in a very bad mood”. He even sacrified his Twitter avatar for the cause. But for Bradshaw, it doesn’t end with just being angry. He’s now actively looking for ways to still get SMS messages from Twitter. Here’s his try:
- Via Jaiku: the invite-only micro blogging service from Google still sends SMS updates to all its users. So a solution would be to feed your Twitter account into Jaiku, then create another account that receives the updates from the first Jaiku account.
- Redirect emails to phone: some mobile operators allow you to forward email via SMS messages to your phone. Create a filter in Gmail that forwards Twitter mail to a special email service of your operator
I realize I’ve described the solutions in a rather cryptic way. Did that on purpose, as I don’t want Bradshaw to miss the reward for his work. So check out the step-for-step instructions on his blog.
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