apps

Jaiku iPhone Mobile Apps – Anyone?

September 8th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, news | View Comments
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Many of the social media pros have left their Jaiku accounts and moved to new micro-blogging platforms including Twitter and FriendFeed. I was late to Jaiku but appreciated both the channels concepts for hashtags, the icons for identification (taxonomy of the posts) and per post comment thread features (much like FriendFeed) that made this tool look like a great place to camp.

Jaiku Acquired

Jaiku was acquired by Google almost two years ago and subsequently became JaikuEngine served from Google App Engine.

March 12, 2009 Jaikido Blog Post: JaikuEngine differs from Jaiku in a few key ways. Although core features like the website, SMS (in the US only) and IM bot still work, feed fetching and international SMS are no longer available.  via Jaikido Blog

It took me a while to piece together all the details of what had become of Jaiku and I can remember searching with anticipation of finding a super Jaiku iPhone app.  To my surprise, I found only one Jaiku app, mJaiku.  I tried to make the mJaiku app work but unfortunately could never get the app fully connected and interactive with my Jaiku account on either my iPod Touch running iPhone 2.0 OS or my iPhone 3 G.  As of the iPhone OS 3.0 update, the app is no longer available in the iTunes store.

The simplicity (much like Twitter) of Jaiku was the beauty to me.  With just a few more UI elements to help organize information and provide taxonomy cues as an overlay to the microblog posts I was convinced this was a best of class tool.  The service is active today and you can view the Jaiku Tour.  I know that many iconic users have since left the site and many Jaiku users display lasts posts from months or years ago.

Today, if you want to use Jaiku on your mobile device, you can use m.jaiku.com.

March 13, 2009 Jaikido Blog Post: Yesterday, we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine. via Jaikido Blog.

I’d like to know if anyone else is looking for or working on an open source JaikuEngine project and iPhone app?  I’m very interested in the potential use of this application for magazine publishers and how both small groups of users and very large groups might take advantage of this tool to interact within a publisher’s media niche.

Related Links:

Support Site for mJaiku http://getsatisfaction.com/mjaiku

Support on Jaiku http://www.jaiku.com/channel/jaiku

Google Code http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/

iPhone Apps Still Need Marketing

June 4th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, strategy | View Comments
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iPhone apps are certainly hot. AdAge recently wrote an article about the developer of the Brushes iPhone App.  The important take away is that there are many apps out there that don’t make money.  Getting the app to the store is just the first step.

All iPhone Apps must also be 3.0 compatible. TechRadar

Increasingly, apps have to be supported by traditional marketing; otherwise they have little chance of making it to many iPhone screens. “The App Store is not a marketing vehicle; it is a distribution vehicle,” said Raven Zachary, president of digital creative firm Small Society.

via Mobile Marketing: Just Having an iPhone App Isn’t Enough – Advertising Age – Digital.

Social Media Friend Management

May 28th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, strategy | View Comments
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I’ts catching up with us.  Our new found friends.  How do we keep all these friends organized.  In college, I’d meet a few dozen new people every semester.  Out in the workforce, (as a young graduate) I met a dozen people a week. With social media backpacks like twitter and facebook, I now meet a dozen new people a day.  So how do we manage all our new social media friends? 

Of course, more apps!

I enjoyed Chris Dannen’s blog on the topic today.

Too Many Social Network Updates? Two Tools for Filtering the Nobodies – Article: Fast Company -

The problem: these apps work. Often too well–the basin is overflowing.

When I look at my Facebook News Feed, Google Talk list and my Twitter client, here’s what I see: old friends, workmates, acquaintances, and then, in a much smaller group, real friends. In an article this week entitled, “What’s a Friend Worth?” BusinessWeek writer John Byrne went straight to the source–Facebook HQ in Palo Alto–to figure out just how many real friends a given Facebook user actually has in his or her network.

via Too Many Social Network Updates? Two Tools for Filtering the Nobodies | TechWatch | Fast Company.

Chris, mentioned two new tools PeopleBrowsr and Zensify.  I ultimately have another old post I plan to update that talks about Facebook and the need for both work, friends, family, and social streams.  Add some privacy controls and make groups a standard element that might cross a major stream group and you might begin to mimick the complexity of real life early social interactions.

We are getting there… but there’s got to be a way to filter and purge the firneds that didn’t quite make it into that long term social pals short list.  After all, there’s only 24 hours in a day.