Once a week we look back at last year’s New Media Days conference and serve you the key insights from a session. If you want the full package, webcasts and slides from all sessions can be found on the NMD main site.
Or you may take a look at Conference Crunching explained.
When Jaiku co-founder, Petteri Koponen, talked about “Microblogging and the Future of Social Media” at New Media Days 07, Jaiku.com had been serving the public for 15 months and property of Google for two weeks. The latter relation being a good pointer of Jaiku’s success in the social webosphere.
Koponen talks about the principles behind a successful social network. To make a site work you must build it around social objects, he tells us, and refers to a theory developed by other Jaiku founder, Jyri Engeström. The social object of MySpace is music, Flickr does photos, Amazon focuses on books etc. These sites work because the users interact around objects they have a mutual interest in.
Jaiku considers their central social object to be the conversation and their argument for how it could disrupt other communication outputs like blogs or photo-hosting sites goes something like this:
A. It’s simpler communication in 140 characters or less.
B. It’s cheaper communication because your messages are pushed for free to all people that follow your updates.
C. It’s more convenient because the service is mobile and context aware.
The notion of a social object is tightly connected to sharing. With microblogging services like Jaiku or Twitter people share their thoughts, their views, their inspiration. Jaiku stands apart because it has a comment feature not limited to 140 characters – a benefit to conversation. Furthermore you can add web feeds to Jaiku from other social media services such as Twitter, Flickr or Delicious.
This makes Jaiku a dynamic lifestream, an automated online diary, logging your activity from several web sites. Microblogging is only the tip of the lifestreaming concept, says Petteri Koponen, and likens the information processing to the Starbucks model: A need-fulfilling, though non-demanding, mobile experience available anytime you feel like it. Perfect for navigating social media galore.
Post Session
While the lifestreaming concept is certainly taking off and reaching the mainstream, Jaiku has been critized for technical flaws and lack of innovation ever since Google acquired it. Word from the founders and Google has been sparse, and Jaiku has allegedly lost some of its followers to the simpler competitor, Twitter.
However, Jaiku and Google are still brewing and according to a blogpost just off the press from Jyri Engeström the porting of the service to a new and better platform (Google App Engine) is just about finished. According to Jyri some of the long awaited improvements include extreme scalability without infrastructure headaches, better accessibility for 3rd party developers, and more support for open web standards like OAuth.
Sounds good to me. I’ll be on the lookout for lifestreaming disruption in the (hopefully) not too distant future…
Hungry for more?
Slides from Jyri Engeström on the future of participatory media
Video of the session with Petteri Koponen (English)