Google Dropped the Ball on Jaiku

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

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Maybe you haven’t joined FriendFeed yet, but that’s no reason why you still can’t enjoy the resources it provides. A handful of links from the service can act as your own personal information filter for finding out what’s currently hot on the net without you ever needing to sign in. How is that possible? By using the publicly available links for the services on FriendFeed.

Here are a few examples:

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=stumbleupon

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=blog

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=googlereader

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=flickr

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=digg

With 35 services to choose from, that’s a lot of pre-filtered content you can access. What’s even better is that each link like those above has an RSS feed attached to it. And again, you can access those feeds without needing to have a FriendFeed account - just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the orange RSS icon.

For example,

StumbleUpon RSS: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=stumbleupon&format=atom

Blog Posts RSS: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=blog&format=atom

Google Reader Shares RSS: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=googlereader&format=atom

Flickr RSS: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=flickr&format=atom

Digg RSS: http://friendfeed.com/public?service=digg&format=atom

Even if you are already heavily involved with FriendFeed, subscribing to these public links will give you a glimpse of the community’s action outside of your circle of friends. But be warned - these feeds aren’t for those that fear the unread count in their RSS reader. As FriendFeed gains in popularity, the number of postings will grow even more so than it is now - which is quite a lot. However, the feeds might be a nice addition to your iGoogle homepage - something to glance at when you’re there, but not something you need to constantly read. (thanks, Jeetblog)

See that YackTrack link at the bottom of this post (RSS readers click through to see what I mean). This little link lets you use the conversation tracking service provided by YackTrack to follow the discussion surrounding an article all across the net including sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress. (You can read previous reviews of YackTrack over on ReadWriteWeb: Launch News and Chatter News).

Today, YackTrack has been updated once again. Now there is TypePad/MoveableType blog support, support for IntenseDebate, and improved Disqus support available.

However, the big news today is the launch of YackTrack RSS feeds and APIs. Yes! Yes! Yes! With the RSS feeds, you now have the option to subscribe to a YackTrack query in your favorite feed reader. This way, you can stay on top of the continuing conversation as it moves around the blogosphere and beyond. These feeds are available from both the main YackTrack page, where you query a link, as well as on the Chatter tab, which lets you search by keyword.

For developers, take a look at the YackTrack API Description to learn more about what’s being offered (a JSON API, for example) and build me some great tools.

From Grooveshark there now comes a handy new tool called TinySong that lets you share music with your friends. To use TinySong, you enter in an artist’s name or the name of the song and do a search. From the Grooveshark database, a list of results will appear. When you see the one you want, click the link and the site will convert the link to the song into a TinySong-flavored TinyURL, which is then conveniently copied to your clipboard so you can share it with friends via IM, email, or Twitter.

Thanks to Leslie Poston at Profy, I’m alerted to a new Wordpress plugin that jumps on the TwitPitch bandwagon, allowing you to get PR pitches DM’d to you via your blog or web site. Nifty! If you missed the debut of the TwitPitch, it was an idea invented by Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant, when he was trying to figure out his schedule for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo. I posted about this concept further on ReadWriteWeb (“Twitpitch: The Elevator Pitch Hits Twitter”), however I think the idea got a bit lost since it came during the big brouhaha over how to pitch to bloggers, which then became that week’s bitchmeme.

Initially, the idea was to utilize the hashtag #twitpitch so everyone could access these micro-press releases, but, unfortunately, that concept hasn’t really seemed to have taken off. I’ve been watching a Summize RSS feed for the term “twitpitch” since that RWW post (and still do) and I’ve only found a handful of useful items there.

However, this new Twitpitch Wordpress plugin takes the elevator concept a little more loosely and allows for anyone to send you a pitch via a Twitter direct message. Unfortunately, being somewhat new to WP, I don’t know if I have the required PHP 5.2+…? But I do know that activating the plugin did this:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘}’ in /home/.tuffy/sarahintampa/sarahintampa.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-twitterpitch/wp-twitterpitch.php on line 26

Looks like a project for another day then.

Link: Author’s hompeage

I would like to thank Thord Daniel Hedengren, who just interviewed me over on BloggerTalks. Get to know me and learn more about Grand Effect over here: http://bloggertalks.com/2008/05/sarah-perez-and-the-grand-effect/. There’s also a short plug about this on today’s The Blog Herald. Thanks, that was fun!

Today, our online world is very much a reflection of the "real" world - we have good friends, acquaintances, colleagues, mentors, peers, family, and others, all of whom join us online in some way, shape, or form. And for those that live in big cities, especially tech meccas like San Francisco, Seattle, or New York, those virtual friendships often intersect with the real world, becoming just an extension of what already exists in real life. However, for many other people, the online world is a place where they go to make friends - friends who hail from all over the globe, friends who will never meet in real life, and friends who, for all the camaraderie and shared interests, don’t really know each other.

The honest truth is that for many people, their online persona is only a fraction of their whole self. For various reasons, many people choose to draw the line between what is publicly shared and what is private. This concern for privacy is even more prominent in older generations, who remember the infamous case of Heather Armstrong, the woman who was fired for blogging about her job online. Along with her, there were many others who had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Even years after the "dooce" incident, sites like EFF were still recommending that the "best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously," and provided tips on how to do so. This led to a rash of anonymous bloggers, who shared personal details of their lives, work, and relationships online, making friends with other anonymous bloggers who did the same. You still see this trend quite a bit in the mommy-blogger circle, where the writers went by pseudonyms like "Mrs. Tiramisu."

But then, as Web 2.0 took root, more people began joining social communities where the value of making friends and sharing your interests in a more open fashion was an integral part of the interactions that took place there. Web 2.0 was all about personalization - adding your unique voice to the community as a whole, where everyone benefited from these individual actions. It became harder to hide your individuality when services like online bookmarking exposed what you thought was interesting, networks like MySpace and Facebook let you share your personal interests and hobbies, and sites like flickr let upload your personal photos. People began connecting, and those connections felt almost if not equally genuine as connections that were had in the "real" world.

And yet, even today, as Web 2.0 morphs into "social media," the fact remains that people are still withholding information about their "true" selves. For some, this is done because of the need to present a professional image online. For others, it’s just a matter of just not being comfortable with revealing the most personal details of their lives for the world to see and for Google to index. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger dove into this subject recently, in an excellent post on the subject of what social media can reveal about you. It began:

Sorry, but I didn’t Stumble your post, even though you asked nicely and you’re my friend. Why didn’t I? After all, it was a great post about overcoming addiction. Sorry, but I didn’t Digg your post, even though normally I would do so. But I didn’t touch your Digg submission, which was a news article about the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Your Reddit submission on a religious topic? Nope. Your del.icio.us bookmark of revealing photographs of a beautiful celebrity? Nope…..With each tweet that I write, each @reply I send, I could be adding brush strokes to a picture I never intended to paint. It could be an unflattering self-portrait or it could be a joyful, exciting slice-of-life image of a real human being others want to get to know.

In other words, we’re carefully choosing the aspects of our personality that we broadcast to the world. A poll on FriendFeed confirmed this to be true. Some people agreed that personal life, politics, and religion were not subjects they brought up online. What’s interesting about these responses from the tech community is the fact that another online community - the political bloggers and blog readers - would have no problem revealing their political opinions online. Politics is the aspect of their life that they’ve chosen to share.

Of course, there were some who felt that they were "pretty much themselves" online and online friends knew them just as well as anyone else, but they seemed to be the minority. There was also the question of differentiating between who is just an online acquaintance vs an actual friend. That’s a good point, but I would argue that even my closest online friends don’t know me as well as my offline friends do. No matter how many different ways there are to communicate via the internet, there isn’t anything that compares to face-to-face interaction.

So, what can we do to be "more real" online? The conclusion of the Remarkablogger post had a few ideas including using separate accounts for public and private selves and/or using privacy settings in the services we use. Maintaining multiple accounts is a hassle, but privacy settings - if done well, like in flickr, for example - don’t have to be. However, it was their last suggestion that’s really inspiring: "Just Don’t Care."

While that may be easier said than done (especially for those who like their jobs) this is a trend you’re going to see more and more of in the future. Gen Y and the other digital natives don’t care. They grew up over-sharing and, quite frankly, they just don’t see what the big deal is. So what if you had an embarrassing picture posted online? We’ve all been there, they would tell you. They would think you were crazy if you were worried about putting a political badge on your web site or posting a curse word in your blog post. The rest of us, however, got a little anxious just thinking about doing so. 

Are we wrong for holding back? Outside of business owners who need to present a professional image, what is really stopping us from saying this is who I am?

It’s good to have programmer friends. One of mine made a tool just for me and he said that I can tell you about it now, too. The tool is called Feedpour and it’s the kind of thing any pro blogger would love. Why pro bloggers? Because for those of us that write professionally, part of our responsibility is turning in invoices that list our blog posts and the rate we’ve charged. For many, I would imagine this is a manual process. It had been for me, at least until Feedpour. What this service does is take an RSS or Atom feed and allow you to export it to XLS, RTF, or PDF formats, which you can download and save to your computer. To begin using the service, you just register your feed on the site, after which you can then export your blog posts at any time by entering in a start date and end date for the posts you want to retrieve. You also must specify whether you want the the data arranged by columns or rows. And last, just pick your preferred export format and you’re done. What a huge timesaver this is! If you have any comments or questions about Feedpour, you can send them in here.

Newstex, a content-on-demand company, serves news and commentary to companies and industries that require real-time information. Some of their customers include CNNMoney, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, LexisNexis, and The New York Times. For the different types of markets they serve, they offer specialized newsfeeds that deliver information from a wide range of sources. For example, for the financial industry there is a newsfeed containing only finance news.

Just recently the company announced a new service called NewsTwits. Similar to how their Blogs on Demand service operates, Newstex will license full-text Twitter content directly from Twitter users and then use its proprietary NewsRouter technology to aggregate and deliver this content to distributors and enterprises in real time. This Twitter-based feed can then being easily integrated as a headline feed into the enterprise-grade applications their customers use.

“Blog content has become a ‘must-have’ for millions of researchers and enterprise professionals,” said Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex. “Now, we are thrilled to be first in licensing and distributing the best user-generated Twitter content via NewsTwits on an editorially-selected, full-text basis for enterprise use throughout the world.”

The company decided to make the jump into Twitter syndication and licensing after seeing an increase in the Twitter activity over the past four months by many of the bloggers they already syndicate. Plus, the 140-character limit of Twitter made for an excellent "breaking news" style headline, just like the old "newswires" of the past.

What’s remarkable about this story is that Newstex’s Twitter licensing and syndication may very well be the first time that Twitter has made its way into the enterprise space. Many have said that Twitter was not ready for enterprise use, but I imagine they were thinking of users sitting at their computers sending tweets back and forth. Instead, the Newstex model shows that there is great value in Twitter’s ability to break news fast, a trend seen recently when the China earthquake occurred, and prior to that, the UK earthquake and the quake in Mexico last year.

Despite the scalability and downtime issues that Twitter has been struggling with as of late, VCs are right to keep throwing money at the service. Hopefully Twitter will be able to overcome their problems because, clearly, the business world is ready for some tweets.

If you haven’t already heard of bTT, get up-to-speed by reading this great review over on Corvida’s site. This Twitter/FriendFeed combo app has probably gotten overlooked by many due to it being Windows-only. However, if you are on Windows, it’s certainly worth a look.

After initially launching a less-than-worthy app by the silly name of bTittleTattle, the company actually listened to the feedback users provided and completely remade the app based on what people wanted. That new app was then re-branded as bTT and relaunched. Now, bTT is nothing like its predecessor, except for the fact that both let you access FriendFeed via the desktop.

Unlike Twhirl, which provides FriendFeed in a separate window, bTT takes a note from AlertThingy’s book and combines the streams. Each service can turned on or off as desired in the app’s settings and there is a convenient link to click to access your FriendFeed remote key. The app does several things well - its sort-by-service feature, for example, makes it easy to filter FriendFeed’s content and its flickr slideshow is a unique feature that other FF clients don’t have.

What’s New

The latest update to bTT includes a few more features that make the app worthwhile - most notably, they’re offering several options for filtering your stream. In the new app, you can click to show or hide posts that have a minimum number of likes, a minimum number of comments, or you can use both filters combined. The options for what that minimum levels should be are configurable in bTT’s settings (the default is 3).

You can also choose to sort the stream by publish date which puts things back in chronological order instead of having your liked/commented on items bumped up to the top as FriendFeed does. Also new is the ability to respond to a tweet via both an @reply and direct message. That last option is pretty cool - even FriendFeed.com doesn’t offer replies via DM.

The new bTT has a new skin available ("paper"). Personally, I prefer this one over the original black theme, which I found hard on the eyes. I would still like a few more choices, though. 

Finally, the new app offers a pop-up video player and includes a built-in URL shortening feature.

There are still a few minor adjustments I would make, like making the up and down buttons visible on the scroll bar instead of just displaying the slider, which I found hard to control when the app was resized to be small enough for my laptop screen…especially when trying to view 30+ comments on a Scoble entry! (I didn’t even realize that they were there at first.) Then when I used them, the scrolling seemed to jump too far ahead, but what it was really doing was updating the screen to display the next item. However, I like the more fine-grained control of actually seeing items scroll by on the screen when I use arrow buttons, and bTT didn’t provide this.

Obviously, this is a minor complaint, but one that speaks to the details that stand between a good app and a great one, which bTT has the potential to be…at least for Windows users, which is something that may ultimately be its shortfall. Oh how I wish this was built on AIR instead!

But still, if you are a Windows user who hasn’t yet settled on a desktop client for FriendFeed, bTT is worth checking out. For Twitter, though, I still can’t part with Twhirl.