Interview with Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström - Twitter Alternative

With the extreme popularity of Twitter, and the talk of how it should be acquired soon, it only makes sense that similar services emerge and gain traction as well.  Jaiku is Twitter's most relevant rival, and I can clearly see why.  I first mentioned Jaiku here, as an offering to those looking for a Twitter alternative. My favorite aspect of Jaiku is the ease with which any feed can be added to your account, for your own purposes as well as your friends'.   And with Jaiku's growing buzz in the blogosphere, I'm happy to have had a chance to catch up with Jaiku's co-founder Jyri Engestrom .

How did Jaiku come about?

In 2006 the two founders - Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen -realized we both wanted a better way to share what we were doing in real life with our friends online. Although we spent a lot of time on blogs and Web services built by our friends, like Flickr, we felt they were too cumbersome to update and difficult to read on our mobile phones. We decided to make a service that regular people would use every day, that was quicker to update on the go and would enable all of us to see what our family members, friends, and colleagues were doing simply by glancing at our handset.

Last summer we met Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa, two talented mobile developers who shared our passion to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence on phones. Mika had already written pretty ingenious code for Symbian phones, that solved some the hardest technical problems related to always-on client-server communication (such as power consumption) as part of his PhD studies. Teemu was one of the key developers in Nokia's Core Applications team, where he had written parts of the Calendar and other core Nokia applications. With Mika and Teemu on board, we decided to build a mobile client and a Jabber back-end for Jaiku.

Later in 2006, we raised seed funding and hired two great Web developers: Andy Smith from Flock, and Juha Törönen, who joined us from the leading Helsinki Web design company. With Andy and Juha we started developing the Web components, support for text messaging, and the ability to embed RSS feeds from other services to your stream of Jaikus. We put an early beta version out quietly last year, and formally launched Jaiku at the O'Reilly ETel conference in March this year.

Where do you see online behavioral trends going, considering your service really allows for the constant updating of user behavior?

We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them.

Just as a recap, the posts on Jaiku are simply called Jaikus. They are shorter than blog posts. Because their content is usually about what you're doing, how you're feeling, or where you're going right now, their value typically also degrades more quickly over time. On many Web services the interval between new updates from a user is a day or more, but on Jaiku the updates are more frequent. When you browse the profiles of Jaiku members, you'll notice that a Jaiku that was posted an hour ago can already be outdated by several newer ones. The content of Jaikus is also often more personal than on blogs. Although many share their Jaikus publicly, a lot of people prefer to share them privately with their friends.

Oh, and a short digression on the name: We came up with the name Jaiku because the posts on Jaiku resemble Japanese haikus. A haiku is a short poem about the moment that a person is living through even as they are writing it down. In Finland too the nomadic Lapp people share stories by singing Joikus. We liked the name Jaiku mainly because it had a fun sound to it. Those who want can also read in it a little reminder that actually the need we're addressing isn't anything new. The basic desire to tell others what you're up to, and have a sense of what they're doing, has been around forever and in all cultures.

Jaiku can really be seen as an aggregator as well as a distributor of personal information.  What are the main directives you were aiming for with Jaiku?

Our general aim is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence (what they're doing, how they're feeling, where they're going). Jyri calls this social peripheral vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss. Even just the simple knowledge that your loved ones are ok can have a lot of emotional value in an increasingly unstable world.

We think our key discovery has been to find an interaction model for posting and commenting across different channels. Jaiku posts can include embedded media like icons and photos. The service supports threaded conversation, and works smoothly from Web, to IM, to SMS, and clients. It integrates automatic updates like changes in your location, availability, etc. from the phone with Web feeds and manually posted Jaikus.

Our accomplishment especially on the mobile has been to bring the contact list to life. Presence information can be used to turn static, "dead" contact lists into dynamic, live ones. Some of our users have remarked that Jaiku Mobile makes the traditional S60 phone book obsolete. Once you start using   live contact list and seeing what your friends are up to, it can feel pretty lame to return to using a standard phone. It's exciting to imagine how presence information from Jaiku would enrich other Web services and desktop applications.

How is communication facilitated between users? Can you get a feed of someone else's Jaikus, or even a feed of your own Jaikus?

You can get feeds of your own and other people's Jaikus in RSS and Atom format, or using our APIs. In a few weeks, you can also use your IM client t  follow your Jaiku contacts and post new Jaikus.

Also, the next release of Jaiku Mobile for both S60 and Java phones will display the Jaikus from your contacts and support commenting. Commenting has become a central part of the service, so making that work smoothly across all clients is very important to us at the moment.

You've recently introduced your beta version for the Nokia S60.  How's that going so far?

Starting with S60 was a conscious decision for us. It was the best platform for developing an application that enabled people to share their presence from their phone on the Web. There are over 100 million Nokia S60 handsets out there,  and we knew we could do something that most people though  was impossible. We're now working on a Java version that is compatible with a lot more handsets. It is currently in private beta.

That said, our interest is not to monopolize the clients. Rather, our vision from the start has been to use open protocols like Jabber and develop APIs so it'll be easy for other people to write clients and connect their own Web services to Jaiku. Large chuncks of the S60 client have been open-source  and we're going to continue contributing to relevant open source projects. We think it'd be cool if in the future people could also write their own visualizations etc. for mobile handsets in e.g. Flash or Python using our client APIs.

Did you have to break a deal with Nokia in order to create this beta version?

Jaiku Mobile does not rely on any proprietary Nokia APIs - the nice part about Symbian and S60 is that it's much more open than just about any other major mobile platform. Aside from that, Nokia has shown a lot of positive interest in what we're doing, and we try to keep in as close touch as possible with our contacts there. One of our developers, Mika, was recently appointed a "Forum Nokia Champion" due to his pioneering work in building the Symbian development community. Quite a few Nokia employees are Jaiku users, and their feedback has been invaluable to us.

What complications did you have in creating a mobile application for Jaiku?

Making a back-end that can support mobile clients is a lot more complex than building your average Web site. It makes developing some features slower, but it's also a competitive advantage because we've solved some pretty hard problems that enable efficient client-server communication. On  the S60 side, porting for S60 3rd Edition took longer than we expected. We found quite a few bugs in the S60 platform and had to work our way around those.

What's next for Jaiku?

The next step is to open a developer section with documentation on how to use our APIs, so the independent developers who are working Jaiku desktop clients, making mashups, and developing mobile clients for other platforms get better support. This will be released by early April.

In addition to the APIs we plan to introduce a bunch of new features in the next couple of months. These include connectivity to existing IM services, a Java client, and support for groups. We've also been experimenting with media sharing and SMS notifications. Once the basic feature set is ready, we plan to start working with our local user communities to offer versions of Jaiku in different languages. We'll also be working to improve our integration with the coolest other online services.