In a travel he made to the Basque Country (he attended a conference) last july, Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku showed interest in meeting the local webscene. Some friends organised that and it was a nice afternoon to talk. I already chronicled that.


(pic by Miguel Garcia, main organizer of that meetup)

Now that Google bought Jaiku, I feel happy for Jyri, his team and family. I hope this is a opportunity to keep pushing this tool. However, just a reminder. Not only Jyri talked at that Basque meetup, but we at the audience also presented some slides. I talked about Geography in microblogging and presence apps. I guess the slide show is always a insuficient way to substitute the talk, but there it is.

However, I would like to raise a point. Comparing Twitter and Jaiku, and how they present location in their systems and APIs, Jaiku gets the upper hand for now. Location is, for the moment, just a string in Twitter, meaning anything. In Jaiku it's more structured, a triple layer of Country / City / Neighborhood is stored, and when combined with the celltagging capabilities of their Nokia mobile client app, that becomes quite useful to determine location of people in your circle:

<location>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>

That's more structured than Twitter's but, please, Jaikuites, make it a little bit more structured:

<location>
<geo>60.1637687683,24.9310493469</geo>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>

It would be great to interact with that kind of data thru the API, writing and reading. And, certainly, opening the celltagging data would make us salivate even more ;-)

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.

Next week, Jyri Engestrom, the finnish creator of Jaiku, a microblogging/presence web service, comes to Donostia to take part in a summer seminar about creativity and entrepreneurship, have some holidays, and also share a meetup (or lab meeting) with geeks and web fans of the local group Cadius Donostia. Fortunately, 'll be at both events.

Jaiku is fun. I find it more interesting than Pownce, though I see that Twitter has more traction. Then, Facebook came in storm to capture us grown-ups, and that's also some kind of microblogging / networking app. So, can you open accounts in all those and hope to be consistent? Difficult. Right now, my Jaiku account has my Twitter feed among its inputs, and in Facebook I have both apps, the one for Twitter and the one for Jaiku (also Powncer!). So, what I do is, I send msgs to Twitter from Facebook, and as those are fetched by my Jaiku, they're also there. Straight and clear (well, almost).

I'm preparing a lightning talk for the Cadius Lab meetup with Jyri. I'll try to make some points around Geography in microblogging and presence services.