Interacting around Jaiku

It's been nice to meet with Jaiku's founder Jyri Engeström twice this week in our little city Donostia. First in this course, and then a meetup with the local geek & blogging scene yesterday. In the university thing, Jyri basically followed this slide show, adding some notes about creativity.



Yesterday, at the meetup, Cadius Donostia Lab (Cadius Donostia being the local mailing list), he spoke more freely about Jaiku.

• Its origins in mobile, partly because of the background of Jyri at Nokia's R & D section.
• Its particularly brilliant phone app, suitable for some Nokias, which was quite unknown to us, web users largely, living in a place where flat access rates for mobile Internet are not an easy option.
• He explained how the mobile Jaiku app does celltagging when posting photos to Flickr. Look at the machinetags in Jyri's pics. Interesting talk about opening databases of geolocated cell antennas.
• Business model: ad based, and we'll see, let's focus on the product. Don't want to be distracted by carriers asking for particularly tailored apps.
• Compact team, 7 people. Technically, Jaiku begun on Ruby on Rails, then the web side has been built in PHP, but many components, particularly in the mobile side, are in Python, so they're going to rearrange it pythonically in Django.
• Localisation. We'll see multilingual Jaiku. They've got advice on this from the i18n team at Mozilla foundation at it will be an open process, if users volunteer to translate into Basque, there will be Basque Jaiku.

The locals also gave some talks. I made a presentation about how I see the interaction between geo-things and these microblogging platforms (Jaiku, Twitter and also Facebook, not microblogging properly but with some resemblance to it): I think Tagzania may have things to do interacting with microblogging sites from that geo perspective. Gorka Julio Teketen spoke about his nanoformats in Twitter and showed some clever Yahoo Pipes examples. He announced that the nanoformat wiki-based process and discussion goes now to Microformats.org, it's been kind of accepted into that group after some contacts between Teketen and Chris Messina, who has been pushing the idea of picoformats. Now, around Microformats.org, pico and nano may converge hopefully.

David Gonzalez Ketari, a local hacker who acts like a one-man-orchestra, announced Nirudia.com, a fotolog platform for geolocated pictures. A mixture of Panoramio and fotologs... Ketari's multilingual bloggin app Nireblog has seen great success over the last months, and maybe he'll repeat that with this.
    
And those were not the only speakers. We all interacted a little bit. 20 people talking freely around web ideas and projects... A good afternoon. We lost the Aubisque finnish of the Tour, won by Rasmussen.... Well thought, I think that we lost nothing.