Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Google Acquires Jaiku

Google acquired Jaiku, a Helsinki-based continuous partial presence startup.  I'm really happy for Jyri and the whole Jaiku team.

My best post about Jaiku is here.  Google just got one of the better mobility and social software design teams.  They have a far richer understanding of presence than anyone I've met.  It seemed when they got started that they would be bought by Nokia, who is trying to turn into an internet company.  Jaiku is more than a Twitter alternative.  With Google's portfolio, you could easily see it augmenting Gtalk and Orkut on the web and mobile clients. 

But perhaps the greatest direction they can go with this is lifestreaming.  Follow me on this.  Google has said they will compete with Facebook through openness.  Facebook's Social News Feed is the new Inbox, the focus of attention when it is the economy.  To compete against it, the challenge will be overcoming the semantic advantages Facebook has by keeping everything on their platform for constructing the Social News Feed.  With Google's savvy around structuring the unstructured, picture lifestreaming evolving into something that infers permalinks for social activity.  One day your Google homepage may be a stream of your friends and what they are doing, sharing, and adopting.

Then again, Anil might be right that Jaiku is the new Dodgeball.

Pownce: Collaboration from and at the hip

At first glance, Kevin Rose of Digg's new startup Pownce is Yet Another Status Message Service (YASMS) like Twitter, Jaiku or Plazes.  But really, its a collaboration app made for the most modern web.  It's bound for adoption because the founders can drive word of mouth and its inherent virality.  And perhaps what it does is less important than the three trends it represents.

Like others, the primary activity is messaging to your social network.  You message to all your friends or public like others, or directly like typing "D Username" in Twitter at the beginning of a message, but also lets you select a subset of friends.  Beyond messages, you can share links, files and events.  Beyond doing this on the web, there is a Windows or Mac rich client.

The digerati and diggerati will probably rant away about how it doesn't have SMS or IM integration like Twitter, how the content is mundane (same thing with blogging five years ago), how it needs APIs and microformats (which it does, and hooks into Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and Facebook are inevitable), or just complain about adding friends again (Adding friends is the new zen).  The design is slick on both the web and client and they will polish up key details like last names, comment threading like Jaiku, permalinks and need a more public space to explore. 

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it? -- Henry Miller

But here's the three trends:

YASMS Gets and Ad Format -- I admire startups that launch with an actual business model.  They have introduced a new Ad Format, a message broadcast into the stream with the Pownce icon (the green P in the above screenshot is an ad from PBwiki, I love wikis) that doesn't seem to persist.  I didn't mind the ad from LaughingSquid (first I saw) in my peripheral attention.  And if I did, I could pay to make it go away, but subscribing to the Pro version for $20/year and also be able to send files over 100MB.

AIR Gets a Viral App -- The client is built on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly Apollo and still in Beta.  Pownce's virality will give AIR the airtime it needs for base of users to install it, making it easier for the next AIR client to come along.  This should be AIR's showcase.  That said, Pownce's model is what I call contained virality, where limits are part of the draw and when you are in you feel in (at least to share music, a hidden driver).

Consumer Collaboration Get Hip -- Anyone who follows the enterprise collaboration space will immediately see parallels with P2P collaboration apps like Groove or Shinkuro.  Or IM, Skype and more directly enterprise IM like MindAlign.  The key difference is group forming by social network and default modes of sharing more publicly.  Pownce will appeal to a very different demographic, that's already collaborating on blogs, wikis and IM, and potentially full a space in between.

There are several vectors in which Pownce could go, or others could go towards including presence, location, public IM, security, indexing and integration.  Pownce will have to open up invites soon (I'm out, please don't ask) to build its network effect before others encroach.  It isn't unique enough to gain the continuous or at least partial attention of users for yet another client.  Infrastructure costs will be greater than P2P.  At the risk of breaking the design and making it too complex, Pownce should give serious thought to the role of standards and how they could be a client for Facebook.

Please, I don't have any invites.

Twitteroll

What do you get when you cross a Blogroll with Twitter?  A Twitteroll.

Status Contests and Attention Aggregators

I find myself updating my status, or answering the question "what are you doing?" across Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes and Facebook.  This is made easier through clients like Twitterific, Juhu, Plazer and some Facebook hacks that are less attractive.  I'm using these clients for more than updating status easily, however.  They are a new kind of attention aggregator -- bringing the status or lifestreams of my social networks to me in real time.

They are pretty cool tools, if you haven't tried them.  For Twitter, having a client fits my laptop-oriented daily use, so I can mostly turn the mobile client off (text "off" to 40404, and "on" when you are roaming around) and subscribe to a larger social network.  For Jaiku, having a client brings continuous partial presence to my laptop, that is far richer because people are lifestreaming (adding feeds from other tools like blogs to enrich their presence).  For Plazes, the Plazer has always let me share my location, but now it is richer with status sharing and a reverse-chronological view of your network.  Facebook will surely have a better client soon as part of their quest to be the social operating system, and hopefully incorporate your Mini-feed.

But all this client development seems like one-offs, status service providers have stayed out of development perhaps wisely, and there is ample room for innovation.  As is usually the case, we've been here before -- a lack of standardization and cooperation yields less and leaves room for a large service provider to monopolize.

I don't think we want to wait for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to provide a status and lifestream integrated user experience that flows through clients, let alone browsers or operating systems.  I do think this will happen as status services fill a valuable niche in our demand for social interaction, let alone being a new command line for web services.

Compare where we are to how RSS and Atom provided common standards for developers to innovate.  There was a time where almost every graduate CS student would write a news aggregator for fun and new startups proliferated.  Adriaan Tijsseling leveraged Atom from the earliest versions to create client blog editor, Ecto, and went beyond the Flickr Uploader to also offer aggregation with 1001.  Some, like Newsgator, plunged deep into clients across operating systems, email clients and mobile clients to let you work across them.  But the result isn't the case where one vendor, could own publishing, syndication and reading including clients.  We have a healthy marketecture that continues to innovate.

There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services.  I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new.  I just know it is coming.  It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku.  You will be able to edit your status and perhaps more, like location to Plazes or a blog entry.  Maybe it will be built on Apollo or Google Gears, maybe a Firefox extension or a mobile version on WidSets.  But it won't happen too soon.

The problem is, while the REST APIs are easy to work with, they aren't standardizing.  Maybe they will converge on using the Atom Publishing Protocol.  Maybe they can work out a way to let you write your status once, publish everywhere, and remove dupes when aggregating.

Jaiku Tips the Tuna?

Did Jaiku tip the tuna yesterday?  Leo Laporte  jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku, his 4,000 followers followed.  The Twitter herd debated platforms, has herds do when chosing to migrate.  Suddenly the story was Twitter vs. Jaiku and Jaiku team dealt with digesting a big chocolate Easter Bunny.

Let me provide some context first.  I was exposed to Jaiku at Aula in Helsinki last June.  From my notes:

Jyri Engeström and Mika Raento on social peripheral vision.  Phones are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call before you do.  You need to process social signals before using the device.  Jaiku, their startup is looking to augment basic functions of a phone by pasting onto it what is happening on the internet.  If you can't find anyone in your contact book, you can search a directory made of everyone's contacts. Calendars let you share future events to let you plan together.  The demo shows very rich profiles based on phone usage (automatic data) and more social signals (more manual) -- which provides a different form of Presence.  In usage, people still call regardless of presence, but when someone doesn't answer, you leverage the presence to understand why. Integrated IM is more convenient than SMS, and includes group messaging.

Since then, Twittr came on the scene and Jakiu's web interface got a major upgrade.  It's important to understand the significant differences between the two services, their design thinking and strengths.  Joi Ito:

Looks like a bunch of people are trying out Jaiku after "tasting" co-presence with Twitter. To me, Jaiku, which existed before Twitter, is a bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd "getting" co-presence...

Jaiku comes from a "presence" background allowing bluetooth proximity, phone idle time, ringer mode and other things to trigger state changes - the messaging came later. Twitter, on the other hand, is primarily messaging, which as we all know, is just a flexible and manual vector for presence information.

To understand where Jaiku is coming from, I encourage you to read this interview with co-founder Jyri Engeström and his post on social peripheral vision (the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues).

  Twitter on paper 
  Originally uploaded by jack dorsey.

In digging around for some of the thinking behind Twitter, I found Jack Dorsey's napkin design for Twitter:

from a note circa Jan 2006.

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

The interesting thing is that I found it on Jack's Jaiku page where he had included his Flickr stream as part of his presence.  For a long time I've wanted the Xfire for social software, and today Jaiku provides this kind of persistent presence.

Jaiku lets you incorporate feeds from your blog, bookmarks, photos, location -- and Twitter if that is where you prefer to post status.  Every post of any kind becomes an object for conversation, through comments.  This works easily in the web UI, but it also works in the Nokia mobile client because presence isn't overwhelming. Presence is something you can glance at, not an SMS interruption. 

Unfortunately today this requires a Nokia phone, but they are working on a Java version that also specifically supports commenting (kind of like Radar.net, more on that later).  People coming from Twitter won't expect the ability to add their attention breadcrumbs to their attention stream (developers will) and will probably expect something they can adopt on their mobile easily.  In the US, this is a significant barrier (Sidenote: fuck you Cingular.  Making me change calling plans to switch SIM cards from my Blackberry and claiming the handset wont work because you don't sell it even though it runs the same software is an easy way to lose me as a customer, as if I had alternatives.).  Jaiku isn't ready to Tip the Tuna until their next mobile client comes out. 

But until then I'd expect a lot of people to use the web version as an attention pool.  Posting to Jaiku via Twitter is a no-brainer and I'd hope you can do the opposite without loops and dupes soon.  Rafe asked the right question:           Is it possible Twitter and Jaiku will end up sharing users, instead of hoarding them like the IM services did early on? I responded: systems of record are being replaced by systems of discovery. 

In other words, in the first web I would worry about which service I would commit my social network, presence and persistence to.  But services are increasingly making data discoverable and discovering data from other services.  We used to worry about transporting our FOAF relationships, but then I think we realized that each tool is different and being able compose a different social network was a virtue (not just because of faceted identity, but that different tools need different filters and the social network is the filter).

UPDATE: This post was written in haste before going out for Easter.  Jaiku released their API and developer site.  I forgot to highlight Marko Ahtisaari's why I use Jaiku:

1. Silent sociality - checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won't be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

2. Small-group sociality - Jaiku is not about celebrity. I'm interested in sharing state with a small group I'm nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

3. Mobile sociality - Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I'm using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

4. Background sociality - Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn't confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

Rafe posts about adding your Twitter to Jaiku.  And I wanted to add one last thing.  If you aren't trying it with a mobile client, you can't get the real experience.

Talk of the Town

I'm quoted on the front page of the Financial Times on Twitter.

Over the past two weeks, Twitter has attracted the sort of hyperbole the Valley reserves for its next internet darling – though such self-reinforcing adulation also led to dotcom mania...

"This is the first application that people have got excited about since Flickr came out," said Ross Mayfield, a Valley entrepreneur, comparing it to a popular photo-sharing site bought by Yahoo in 2005. "I don't think it will be the next YouTube – but I do think it will gain wide adoption," he said.

Users of Twitter post short messages – up to 140 characters – that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. "Twitter probably wouldn't have existed before blogging, when people learned to be more transparent," Mr Mayfield added.

Though launched publicly last summer, use of Twitter started to take off in the middle of March after it was adopted by tech­nology bloggers attending the South by Southwest conference in Texas. As people like Mr Mayfield lauded the service on their blogs, interest spread quickly among the Valley's key opinion-formers.

The extended online version has Biz Stone saying they learned from Friendster's performance failings.

In other mobile social software news, Mozes announced a deal with Universal Motown to provide Twitter-like real time community around 60 recording artists.  Jaiku is launching a new mobile client and website this week at Etech.

Moodgeist, Skype and Twitter IM Overlay

Given Twitter has reached escape velocity, I'm sure Obvious Corp. is in for an exit.  It is a clear and simple fit for many social media portal players.  But I think the interesting fit is how Twitter could complement an IM network.  To turn this question around, consider if AIM, Y! messenger, MSN or others suddenly enabled IM status to serve as the message and the buddy list to be a social network?

Well, the prototype already exists, with Skype.  Jaanus Kase, Skype community marketing manger, created Moodgeist.  You install a pinger and your Skype mood message is broadcast publicly.  You can browse recent moods, subscribe to feeds and see popular words.

Now, its just a hack to show off the Skype API, and me mentioning it might crash his server.  But you can see where it could go.  If Moodgeist pingers were part of the Skype software, the social network truly served as a filter, they added an SMS gateway and let you share moods either publicly or privately -- you have Twitter on a massive scale, technically.

But this is the consumer internet and Twitter has less to fear.  Twitter is a cultural product.  You see culture in the conventions and shared language such as @username.  You can't just overlay culture, it needs to be cultivated.

Twitter Tips the Tuna

On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna.  By that I mean it started peaking.  Adoption amongst the people I know seemed to double immediately, an apparent tipping point. It hasn't jumped the shark, and probably won't until Steven Colbert covers this messaging of the mundane.  As Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user.

Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network.  You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM.  A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac.  Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, "what are you doing?" A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own.  Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence -- and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

Anil Dash was spot-on to highlight "The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn't expect."  A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone.  Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation.  Further, when you see an to someone who isn't in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined.  This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption.

While the app is viral (you have to get others to adopt to be able to use it), mobile social software has great word-of-mouth properties.  At Wikimania this summer, a buzz went off in my pocket when I was having dinner, which prompted me to get Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and the brothers Gillmor to adopt.  Wednesday was the first day of TED, so a bunch of A-listers spread it.  At SXSW it seems to be the smart mob tool of choice, and there is even a group for it with a feature I've never seen before, JOIN. UPDATE: Judging by this SXSW Twitter screen, Obvious is embracing obvious group forming to further adoption.

Most recently there has been a rise in fake identities and even celebrities. Partially because people want to form more than one group, sometimes as integration points with other communities.  Some of the groups I've spotted include AdaptivePath, 1Password (release update), Barcamp, ArsTechnica, BBC (stories), Digg (stories), MarsEdit (release update), Technorati (a hack that begs people for blurbs in WTF), Techmeme (a hack that posts new top stories), Twitterific (release updates) and Wordpress (release updates).  Andy Carvin hypothesizes Twitter could save lives in a catastrophe, but group forming is already ahead of his theory with the USGS Earthquake Center on Twittter. If you come across other groups, please add them in comments.

This week most of my company joined Twitter and I set up http://twitter.com/socialtext for no reason in particular.  I posted the login in a private wiki page to let anyone contribute.  But when Moconner saw how simple the API was, he wrote a bot to let us post from our IRC channel.  Now we have a low threshold way to express group identity that fits with the way we work.

Liz Lawley well addressed the differences of this form of presence and criticisms of mundane content and interruption costs.  She highlights "exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates." 

However, I do think the the interruption tax is significant -- especially with the quickening of adoption.  You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz's point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs.  But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload.  I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

Good thing too, because back when it was called twittr people held back believing what they posted would be interrupting on mostly mobile devices.  Lately I think people just go for it, and most consumption is on the web or other clients.  I'd love to see some research on posts/user, client use, tracking @username, group identities, geographic dispersion and revealing other undesigned conventions.