Interview: Jaiku’s co-founder Jyri Engeström about mobile microblogging

Jaiku is a mobile application that resembles a combination of instant messaging and blogging, to make it easy to tell people what you’re doing. Next it needs automatic GPS update capabilities! Jaiku’s co-founder Jyri Engeström gave us some interesting examples of what people are doing with his product.

What new uses for Jaiku are mobile users discovering?
Engeström: Here are some examples that come to mind:

• One of our users is a professional adventurer, who uses Jaiku Mobile to post updates from his expeditions, like when he climbed Mont Blanc.
• A Finnish couple who travelled to Africa to adopt a child used Jaiku to send updates from their phone to anticipating relatives and friends at home.
• A teacher who organized an international collaboration on environmental change between schools in developed and developing countries set up a Jaiku channel, because some of the schools in developing countries did not have computers with Internet access – but they could still participate from mobile phones using SMS.
• Groups of friends use Jaiku to coordinate ad-hoc meetings after school and work. I find this particularly useful, as I often don’t have time to schedule meetings after work, but I frequently pop into a café or pub to say hello to friends when I notice on Jaiku that they are nearby.
• Another recent experience was when I was shopping for baby clothes, and posted a request for some advice. Within minutes, I had received detailed advice for where to go and what to buy.

Jaiku sounds like wearing your life on your sleeve. Do you offer anything for the more private types of people?
Engeström: A lot of people don’t mind publishing their life online. But even if you’re not one of those people, you might still participate in a conversation with a group that shares your interests. Jaiku users can create up to three channels for groups. One of our most popular channels is the back-channel for a net radio show This Week in Tech. Another popular channel is the one for the Second Life user community. Several conferences and festivals have projected Jaiku channels from screens live on-site, like Ars Electronica is doing in Austria this weekend, so festival-goers can text in their comments and receive updates from the organizers.

What about people like me, who always forget to send updates?
Engeström: Our reference mobile application, Jaiku Mobile for Nokia’s S60 platform, enables you to share your “rich presence”: location, availability, and phone calendar with your selected contacts automatically from your mobile. It makes Jaiku useful for people like my parents, who don’t have time to write and post new updates that often. By simply having their phone on, they can share their current presence with their contacts. I find that very useful, as I travel a lot and my mom lives alone. It gives me reassurance to know she is all right and reachable even though I might not always call her – and she tells me that through Jaiku she’s gotten a better idea of what’s going on in my life. Nowadays I always have some interesting recent event to talk about with her.

Michael M.

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