Digital Common Sense

I’ve recently been invited to participate in beta testing of the new Jaiku client for the Nokia S60 phones.Beyond that, the good folks at Jaiku have given me the privilege of introducing the Nokia client and some of the new features that are now available. I’ll be doing this in a series of three pieces, starting today. We’ll look at a few screenshots and I’ll take you on a gentle tour through my experience using Jaiku on my Nokia N95. There are other bloggers in the beta program now as well, and come Saturday you can expect to start seeing posts from them describing their experiences.

First, if you aren’t a Jaiku user today, you need to understand that Jaiku is what I call a lifestream aggregator. When you build your profile, you have complete control over what you wish to share of your lifestream of information. For many, that’s simply their Jaikus. Using this approach, a user can share brief snippets of information - current status, pose a question, leave a thought - for others to see.

Digging more deeply into Jaiku, we find you can also import RSS feeds of all flavors into your lifestream. For me, this means if you read my lifestream, you see blog posts from three different blogs, Flickr photos, blip.tv video posts, even Twitter posts. I’ll explain more about why I think this approach is revolutionary and exciting in a post tomorrow or Friday. It’s taken me a while as a Jaiku user to develop an appreciation for just why this is approach to aggregation is really important. I think it’s positively revolutionary from a social networking perspective

This isn’t the first Nokia client for Jaiku, but this release is such a major leap forward, I suggested unwrapping it in stages. I’m not going to show screenshots of every data entry screen. Partly because the setup is almost exactly like the earlier version. I will say that installation and setup was easy, seamless and painless. It only takes a few minutes.

Once you’ve installed and configured Jaiku, here’s the first screen I see.

You’ll be the first contact in your contacts list. And there are a few points of interest on this screen I want to point out. First, note the tabs along the top, just above my name. Those are important because this tabbed interface on the mobile handset provides easy navigation, using the five-way navigation button, to other features and functions. In this version of Jaiku, those are real highlights.

You’ll notice that there’s a yellow icon to the right of my name, and a green icon next to my friend Darla Mack. That’s an indicator of the status of our telephone. That’s right, we’re sharing phone status. The yellow icon means that my phone is in silent mode. Darla’s red icon tells me her phone will ring.

I’ve got visual representation of presence and status. I can tell who’s online in their Jaiku client, and the status of their phone. And yes, if they’re on a call, I can tell they are busy.

Note that there’s a little gray bubble icon next to Darla, Dannie and Dameon’s pictures. That means they’ve posted new Jaikus or comments that I have not yet read. More on that tomorrow. Today we’ll focus on the status - presence and availability information. I believe that as Jaiku grows in popularity and widespread usage, it goes beyond being that vital lifestream aggregator into another form of presence manager, but with a new twist.

Presence has been evolving as a concept. It began with the very binary buddy list that said I was either online or offline. It’s evolved to other facets of presences - on the phone, at lunch, etc. - but presence has still not become a rich feature with a great deal of depth. Jaiku is helping presence evolve to a next generation. While Jaiku doesn’t compete with my friends at iotum in any way, I see these two companies as real thought leaders in providing tools that let me share my presence, availability and status information with family, friends and colleagues.

The status information I’m referring to is the Jaikus my contacts have posted. We see the first few words, but tomorrow we’ll dig into those messages and how they become useful. For the moment, we’ll note that I have an indication of when my friends were last active with Jaiku. Dannie posted an hour ago, Dameon five hours ago, and ambermac hasn’t posted in two weeks. Darla’s entry doesn’t show how long ago because she just posted it before I captured this. So I know her’s is very near real-time.

On my information screen above, looking at my own profile, we see that I’m using the phone. We’ll get a glimpse of why that might be important in a moment.

We see where I am, in Olympia, WA. This is simple field the user populates. And, I think an opportunity for a future enhancement. Today, I type in Olympia, WA. If I travel, I put wherever I am in the data field. My N95 has GPS, so I believe there’s a future opportunity, as mode handhelds incorporate GPS technology, to geotag my phone location and tie it to a maps application, assuming I was willing to share that level of information. For many people, this might simply say “home” or “work”. What’s nice about this Jaiku client is that the user is fully in control over what information they choose to share. If you don’t want to give this sort of information out, it is just as easy to not share.

The people nearby indicator shows how many bluetooth connected neighbors I have at any point in time. In the screenshot I have none, but sometimes it shows connections. It doesn’t show a great deal of information about those connections that I’ve seen, but I think it has potential. It’s an interesting point of data that may become useful.

The last icon on the list is my calendar, with a somewhat familiar Outlook-like icon. As a user, I can share the title of the event, so you know what I’m doing, or simply share Free/Busy time. I’ve chosen to only share Free/Busy information, so you see that I have an appointment from 10 to 11.

That’s me looking at my own information, and I used it as an example. But let’s look at my friend Darla again to see what I know, on my mobile device, about other people.

I can see Darla used her phone ten minutes ago. That means she may be available to talk if I call her. I think the icon to the right of her name should be green here, like it is on the main screen. That may be a minor glitch in the beta. I know that’s the intent.

I know Darla’s in North Carolina. Because I know Darla, I also know she’s a Nokia user who’s constantly playing and tweaking. And she’s the sort pf person who’s likely to change her location to somewhere else if she’s on a trip. Darla’s in my social and business network and I know enough about her as a person to know this may be useful information.

There’s no information about Darla’s bluetooth neighbors. I don’t know if that’s because she has none, or has perhaps chosen not to share that information. At this point, this remains a piece of information that’s interesting, but not critical. We’ll figure out how to use this as things unfold.

Lastly, Darla’s shared her Free/Busy time too. I can see she’s free until 19:00 tomorrow. That’s useful because I might want to call her later. It’s also not clear to me yet whether any time conversion is performed. This calendar information is pulled from Outlook synchronization with the handset. But I’m in Washington and Darla’s in North Carolina. Is that 19:00 her time or mine? I confess I don’t know yet. Her time would be my suspicion.

What we’ve seen is that the Jaiku client, in it’s basic form, provides presence, availability and status. It give me some useful information about the people I’m in contact with. It’s a new perspective on how I manage my relationships with people.

Earlier in the post I said that Jaiku as a lifestream aggregator introduces a revolutionary change. Although I’ve been an active user and fan of Jaiku for some time now, it was really this new client that opened my eyes to the big shift in how this applies to social networks. I’ll talk about it more in the posts to come this week. For me, I’m detecting a fundamental shift in how I think about aggregators. My RSS reader aggregates flows of information. Lots and lots of information gets aggregated. Mostly it’s blogs aggregated by subject.

Jaiku let’s me look at all the flows my friends have chosen to share, in one place linked to them personally. If RSS enables aggregating information flows, Jaiku refines that and let’s me look at flows related to my specific contacts. RSS helps me manage information flow. Jaiku lets me manage my relationships with contacts. I can see what they’re doing, thinking, writing in whatever information flows they choose to share. I think we’re onto something new, and I think it’s important.

If you haven’t signed up for Jaiku yet, now’s the time. Changes are afoot, and this really is going to change how a lot of us work, collaborate and share information about ourselves.

Technorati Tags: Jaiku, presence, availablity, status, social networking, managing relationships

Filed by Ken at 6:11 am under General