Digital Common Sense

This is the last in my three part series of posts exploring the new Jaiku client for the Nokia S60 Series 3 phones. I’m sure I’ll continue to write about Jaiku, and I know this particular beta release has made me think a lot about social networking tools and how we use them. If you haven’t seen the preceding posts, Part 1 can be found here and here; Part 2 is here and here.

Inside the beta program, there are several people testing this version on a variety of Nokia S6o Series 3 handsets. Just a reminder that I’m only it on my Nokia N95 for this series of posts.

Yesterday I mentioned that several other bloggers had joined the beta program now. I hadn’t expected to see them posting quite yet, but today Jonathan Greene posted one of his stellar video tours of the client. Jonathan puts far more effort into those videos than I. His post, Jaiku Mobile - Lifestreaming with my friends is well worth a read, and you won’t find video like his anywhere else.

We’ve looked explored Jaiku as a lifestream aggregator and some of the basics of the new beta client. We also touched on how we can use Jaiku as a status sharing tool. Jonathan’s video, coupled with my earlier posts and screenshots cover things pretty thoroughly, but I do have a couple of things left to share.

Let’s start with Jonathan’s video post and the reactions. He’d been on the road for a bit. I think he’s off for a long weekend. Here’s the tickler I see on my mobile screen.

I clicked the post by his name to drop into the stream of posts from Jonathan, and here’s what I get next.

There’s a little icon that says 4 in the lower right part of the screen. That tells me that his post from 50 minutes earlier has four comments. If I click that icon, I get to read the comments, in context.

Notice what I mean about in context. Jonathan’s post still shows, but the comments are threaded directly with it. To read them all, I’d simply scroll down. Jonathan’s jazzed that Robert Scoble (Jaiku smacks down Twitter on mobiles?) mentioned the link to his video on intomobile (Video: Review of the Jaiku Beta client for S60)     post. Neil Vineberg calls Jonathan a rock star.
(Side note: Neils the PR person I’ve worked with on helping get these posts on the Jaiku beta going. He’s the rock star working with the other rock stars in Finland at Jaiku central - Jyri, Petteri, Teemu, and the others I don’t know yet)

This is the social networking aspect of Jaiku that’s really catching on like wildfire. It’s unlike Twitter. Richer and deeper in human connection. It’s not like Facebook. No ambitions of owning all your networking data. Jaiku absolutely excels and facilitating the human connections. The other tools are nice, but what I see people chattering about is something akin to a telephone call. Keeping in touch with friends and colleagues via Jaiku (using any of the posting tools available) is as simple as a phone call. Well, except it’s free. It’s a dimension of social network that we just haven’t seen anywhere before. It’s not IM. It’s not IRC. It’s not SMS. It’s Jaiku. It’s as rich and deep as you choose to make it.

There are a couple of settings screens I want to share so you can see underneath the covers just a bit. When we click Settings from the Options menu, here’s the screen.

Yesterday I talked a bit about the idea of sharing our calendar information, but I didn’t show you how easy it is. When we click on the Calendar Sharing field, here’s what we see.

User control. We have a simple choice of sharing the title of the event, only Free/Busy time, or nothing at all. I’ve chosen to share Free/Busy information.

Back on that Settings screen, we can also scroll down to access the following -

We can easily configure how often Bluetooth scans. Some people, especially those without an unlimited data plan on their phone, may wish to set Jaiku to connect manually so they don’t incur unexpect charges in the background. And we see that Jaiku is using the Jabber protocol. That might be a hint of some interesting things to come in the future. I have to wonder how easy it would be to leapfrog in a user-to-user chat capability. Then again, we’re using this on our cell phones. If I want to chat with someone on my cell phone, I’ll call them. Texting for any length of time can only lead to a disjointed conversation.

At the risk of repeating myself too often, I’m going to quote Stowe Boyd again from my post yesterday.
Stowe said:

Once again, Jaiku is a laser beam. It doesn’t distract or dilute our attention. It’s hones our focus in on what we wish to pay close attention to. For me that’s the people I interact with, not the data in an RSS feed.

This closes my three part series dedicated to the beta Jaiku client. It’s still in private beta, but I believe the beta will move to open, public access in a short while. I’m guessing sometime in July. if you’re running Nokia S60 Series 3 phone, I encourage you to give it a whirl. I’ve been quite pleased to see that the people I helped pull into the beta testing all seem to be as impressed as I’ve been.

Again, if you haven’t signed up for Jaiku yet, now’s the time. Feel free to add me as a contact. The beta software is still evolving, and I’m sure we’ll see more improvements and tweaks before it hits full general availablity.Jaiku is changing how many of us collaborate and share information about ourselves. It could do the same for you.

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

Filed by Ken at 2:00 am under General, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Technology, Unified Communications