Mindtrek has as theme: Back to the Future. As a start of the conference a concept video for a hypothetical product, called the Knowledge Navigator, was shown, which Apple Computer produced in 1987. Voice control was predominant in the video as well as an intelligent interface.
But the first presenter Teemu Kurppa did hardly go back in the future. He told about the company Jaiku; the name is a word combination between the Japanese poem form haiku and the Finnish word yukku?). I had not heard of the company yet, but I should have known as Tim O’Reilly said at the occasion of the launch of iPhone the memorable words: I love my iPhone, but bah, no Jaiku. So he was missing Jaiku badly; question is of course whether I would miss it.I understood that Jaiku is a mobile social network. Or, as the founder of the Jaiku Jyri Engestrom, defines it as an object-oriented sociality. The service is about aggregating the personal textual, photographic and video activities and that of your friends on the web. Jaiku brings together streams of reactions and discussion and indicates locations, current calender data. The service entails web, chat, SMS/MMS, rich mobile content, mobile web and third party applications such as a gateway from and to a Blackberry.
Teemu Kurppa described the service as routing content such as text, photographs and videos or even better mobile story telling with shorter messages. Mobile is involving people in an event.
In the back of my mind a mental tickertape kept telling me Twitter, Twitter. Jaiku is a service like Twitter, but different. Twitter is more a social text service; Jaiku is a router and organiser of social events and mobile interaction.
Jaiku is a start-up which picked up see funding and has now 7 people working worldwide. It is basically burning venture capital money at present. A real business model is not present; it is important to grow as fast as possible internationally. Jaiku users can be found in the USA. There are presently 500 users online all the time with traffic of 20Mb per month.
I talked with some people of the Dutch delegation about the service. Would they use a service like that? What make people tick when they use such a service, which muy business partner Hans calls digital exhibitionism (but he is far over 35 years of age)? I can only see that I am not in the target group. Kids are messaging the whole day and telling what they do. I guess that they like to tell their peer group that they are still alive and kicking. But more companies have their angle in the pond: Yahoo groups, Hyves, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and now Jaiku. A lot of personal information can be gathered through these services. Some kids will be come quite unhappy about letting out personal information. Or they might just end up in a group which takes a direction they do not like. Recently I talked to a girl from Polish descent. She had joined the group I love Polish girls; the group tuned into a prostitutes’ bulletin board.
Blog Posting Number: 884
Tags: social network
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