jaiku invites

So after five days and six hours of down time Jaiku is back! At about 11pm BST (GMT+1) or 3PM PDT (PST+1) we had re-ignition! Woooo!

So what has changed? Well it is not on the Google App Engine yet! While the error page was on the Google App Engine the DNS has been updated yet again and Jaiku has moved to some ordinary servers inside the Google network and data centers. If you are still having issues getting to Jaiku now, you will need to flush your local DNS cache and S60 blogger handily provided a link on how to do that. If that doesn’t work then you will have to wait till your ISP does it, normally every 24 hours or try using OpenDNS. As you can see from the below headers it is being served by a nginx sever which is a modified version of apache that is for general use at Google.

Response Headers - http://jaiku.com/

Server: nginx/0.7.11
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:32:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Host
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Cache-Control: no-cache, private
Content-Encoding: gzip

200 OK

The second thing is we now have UNLIMITED INVITES. Yes that’s right much as I suspected, Jaiku has followed the Gmail model and gone for staying closed but with unlimited invites. So if you have some time to spare please share a few a we have quite a back log to get through here at JaikuInvites and to those that are already sending invites out a big thank you!

Other notice able changes are everything is quite speedy and all the badges seam to working great again even some of the flash based ones that were giving trouble before like the map on the home page.

As always stay here with JaikuInvites for all your latest Jaiku News!

The long awaited move for Jaiku has finally begun. Last night they took down the home page and took all services off-line and replaced them with this message …

Folks, we’re offline for the weekend for server maintenance. Now’s a good time to talk to someone you love.

Now I can confirm that they have moved to the Google App Engine and will be hosted there when they come back up. As they say picture paints a thousand words, so for proof take a look at this.

For those of you not familiar with trace routes the last few lines there show that the domain Jaiku.com is now on the Google network. The IP address that it finishes at is also one belonging to several blocks used by GAE. Up until this, Jaiku.com had remained on the same Finnish server it was on when google bought it, trying to survive on just 1GB of RAM.

So what can we expect to see now that Jaiku has moved? Well the number one thing we can expect is near 100% reliable service, no more down time for the API or the IM bot and the last of the 502 Bird. The next thing is open registrations for all, whether that will come in the form of a Google account or Jaiku account remains to be seen yet but I would safely say that we will see Jaiku and Google accounts merged into one in the near future. And finally we will hopefully see the launch of some new features and maybe even the public release of the current updated beta S60 client, I’ve also heard that a lesser featured iPhone client may on the horizon too.

As always we’ll have more news as soon as we get it here on JaikuInvites so be sure to drop by.

Update: I have just been in contact with the Jaiku team and while they can’t comment on anything right now they are “working hard to bring Jaiku back online soon.” I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what’s in store.

Update 2: More proof that Jaiku is moving/has moved, the response headers for Jaiku.com are now returning that they are being served by the “Google Frontend” server. See the full output below:

Response Headers - http://www.jaiku.com/blog/

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: public
Expires: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:46:09 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:59:09 GMT
Server: Google Frontend
Content-Length: 632

200 OK

The Google Frontend server, is the server type that is used by all Google App Engine Apps.

Update 3: Jaiku have confirmed the move! They have updated the status message on their homepage to read:

Setting up our nest in a new datacenter, after finding an issue with a server on Friday. Sorry for the inconvenience. We’re working to get back online soon.

Update 4: Google have issued a second statement to the Eweek Google Watch blog.

“We’ve been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the solution, we’re moving the service to a Google data center. Users can expect Jaiku to be back up soon.”

Nothing new there, but it’s still only 3:00pm in San Francisco where the whole Jaiku team is based this week. Even Teemu Kurppa (@teemu) the normally London based developer is in San Francisco this week, we expect to help with port. One of his last updates on Jaiku before the downtime being (from the Google cache):

“Firealarm sent us out to windy street and I forgot my hoodie. But I saw Guido! “
By teemu Friday, 22 August 2008 in Google, San Francisco, CA, USA. Add Comment

“Server-side fixing”
By teemu Thursday, 21 August 2008 in San Francisco, CA, USA

Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. Well now Jaiku users can get closer on LinkedIn too. I just got an email from LinkedIn approving the creation of a new group for Jaiku user’s. I decided to create the group when I was connecting to some people who I had meet on Jaiku, on LinkedIn. One of the fields it asks you to fill in is how you know this person and with no option to select through Jaiku I decided to fix this. So now we have the Jaiku Users LinkedIn group.

Click here to Join Jaiku Users on LinkedIn

For those of you that don’t know LinkedIn it has a simple philosophy “Relationships Matter”. It says that your professional relationships are key to your professional success and their mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have. Basically it’s a social network of around 20 million professional types from around the world. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your work life so far, so things like your jobs, experience, education etc. People can the connect with you, recommend you, ask you questions and you likewise.

To join the Jaiku Users group on LinkedIn you will need to have an account on LinkedIn, if you don’t then go here to set one up. I’m not going to lie, it takes a while to get all your information up there but it’s worth in the end. If you already have a account on LinkedIn just click on the link below to join the group. If you have used JaikuInvites.com to get or share an invitation to Jaiku the you will be pre-approved to join the group otherwise I have to approve you (there is no way to turn this off).

Click here to Join Jaiku Users on LinkedIn

If you are on LinkedIn you may also want to add me as a contact and please do! You can do this simply by joining the group Jaiku Users and then adding me, using Jaiku Users as the information as to how you are connected to me.

There have been some reports going around that Jaiku is now just a 20% time project at Google. Arctic Startup reports that @teemu has said  “currently Jaiku is being developed on the 20% free time Googlers have for their own projects.” He also goes on to talk about the port to Google App Engine and says that “this port will be done on “normal” working hours.”

After a little further digging into it I discovered this thread on Jaiku in Finnish which is talking about the talk that @teemu gave in a Helsinki University. The basic gist of it is some of the students talking about what @teemu had said. He then comes on to clear a few things up (sorry about the rough translation see the original here. Please correct me if it’s wrong.)

Let me correct some possible misunderstandings, Jaiku will continue its existence and Jaiku is being ported to the Google App Engine . Its porting will make the expansion of the user numbers possible in the future, so that joining without an invite will be possible. The Port is in part worked on full-time but we are also working in part on something new.

Andy @termie works full-time at the moment on the Jaiku port, I have smaller focus at the moment.

To me all this goes to lay further strength to the argument that Google mainly bought Jaiku for the developers and that we may see some sort of Jaiku-Android integration in the future. I wonder if we will see any of Jonathan Mulholland (@jonmul ) predictions coming true?

So just a quick update on what’s been happening here at JaikuInvites. Some of you might have noticed some down time recently and thanks to everyone who jaikued me letting me know. And the other one is the constant fluctuation of number of invites we have on Jaiku.

First Jaiku, the dev guys over there have been doing some bug fixes and it would seem the first fluctuation was caused by @termie uploaded some old invite code, which he fixed as soon as he found out. Now I can only suppose that this one is the same problem, I have asked @termie but haven’t heard anything back yet. You guys will be the first to know when I do though.

UPDATE: The invites are now fixed, thanks to @termie again. You should have all your invites back to what they were before now.

Second is uptime, two things happened in the last week or so that led to that and both of them revolved around JaikuInvites moving hosting.

The first issue was a silly one on my part where I had the domain set up with four name servers two were my own and two belonged to my old host. When I moved the site some of you were still going to the old site as you cached the 3rd and 4th nameservers when one and two went down and then when they came back up at the new location you still saw the old site location. Which was also throwing some nice errors at you, sorry about that. All fixed there now.

The second was outside my control, and it was that my new server went down. This caused the second bit of downtime and although the guys got it sorted out very quickly and efficiently, an unfortunate side effect was we lost a small amount of data.

As a result if you registered to share invites wed/thurs/friday last week, can you please do it again. Also if you requested an invite then and didn’t get it, then register again. I think all had been sent bar one or two as I was checking shortly before it went down so we should be okay but if you got a request about then try and make sure to fulfil it.

Also one or two of you have asked what will happen to us when Jaiku opens, well I hope to keep bringing all the latest Jaiku news here and until the opening we will keep helping you to share those invites. I might also have some new surprises for you too.

Woo hoo! So this this time is for real unlike my slightly prophetic April fools post, we now have confirmation that Jaiku will be reopening registrations. Jaiku is to moving to the newly launched Google App Engine and with that move we will see a much faster Jaiku and the long awaited reopening of registrations.

@jryi - “initially don’t expect new features - if all you notice is an increase in speed and reliability and re-opening of registrations, we’ve been successful :)”

From what I can see (via Mashable) you will need a Google account to use a Google App Engine application so hopefully this will also see the integration of Jaiku accounts with your Google accounts, although they seam to be have some initial teething problems with authentication. This is great news for Jaiku users and once they move is complete we hope to see lots of new features and integration with existing google services.

The official announcement was made over on the Jaikido blog and the announcement of the Google App Engine was broadcast live by @Scobleizer via Qik and live blogged by @techcrunch on the TechCrunch blog.

Google is expected to announce later today that Jaiku is to be the default phone book on all Android devices and that Jaiku will open to the public with the launch of the first Android handsets. The Jaiku API is also going to integrated into the latest release of the Android SDK, also today, to allow other applications to use the Jaiku platform.

I was speaking with jyri yesterday who said he could neither confirm nor deny it but he did confirm that they have been working very hard on some major developments and a big announcement will be made by Google and Jaiku today. Industry insiders have long expected this move since Google purchased Jaiku and many will be delighted to see it come.

This news comes on the same day that Ewan over on SMS Text News announces that Google have bought out the Vodafone group and could be making moves for Verizon.

Google strategy on mobile and the mobile web is really coming into effect and it won’t be long before they enjoy the same level of dominance as they do in other areas. One must wonder how long it will be before we see more Google applications becoming the default, I’m looking very much at Gmail here.

UPDATE: This was an Aprils fools day post, posted on the 1st of April 2008. Google did not announce that Jaiku would be the default phonebook on Android, however they did announce that it is to re-open. Google did not buy the Vodafone group. Also this blog is not run by Jaiku and it is run by me (@CiaranR) as so many of you have quoted this a blog run by Jaiku, Jaiku’s blog is here.

Damien wrote a blog post about social networks today that has some interesting ideas on how people move from one network to another and how people make social networks not the technology that underlies them. He goes into how our mobile contact lists are the next untapped source for these networks and even goes on to mention the Jaiku S60 application which is ready to target this area. He does however do a bit of unnecessary Jaiku bashing given the interesting nature of his post.

“Jaiku is dead”

I pointed this out on Jaiku and the discussion that this sparked off, kind of descended into a Twitter vs Jaiku debate. He didn’t like that, and points out that his post wasn’t about Twitter verses Jaiku, but unfortunately that’s where the conversation happened to go on Jaiku as it so often does on both Jaiku and Twitter.

At one point @dantrevino says that Twitter is only for the socially inept. This lead @NiaLLLarkin to counter this point with a brilliant post on his blog where he compares social networking to a house party. I’m simplifying but he calls Twitter the busy, noisy, sitting room with the loud music, while Jaiku is the quiet kitchen.

What a great analogy I thought, but I have to disagree. For me Jaiku is my party room. Jaiku is where I meet new people. Jaiku is where I go for fun, to be distracted, to dance. In the few months that I have been on Jaiku I have connected with ten’s of people that I would have never meet otherwise, just like I would at party. I have even meet some of them in real life at parties since. On Twitter I don’t think I have connected with anyone that I didn’t have some form of existing connection to.

People do make social networks but where do find the people that make up your social network?

Where is your Party Room?

So it looks like Jaiku is ramping up a gear into stage two of their invite program. There has been no official word from anyone in Jaiku yet but we have reports from far and wide the all Jaiku users now have 20 new invites to share. I have checked this myself with an account I set up just a few days ago for testing and it too has received the 20 invites upgrade.

The 20 invites are being applied as a kind of universal upgrade, in that no mater how many invites you had before, be it zero, two or ten, you now have 20. We have upgraded the share an invite form so you can get back over and re-register with your 20 new invites.

This reminds me so much of the way invites went with Gmail and it hopefully shows that the big G are ready to step things up with Jaiku. The next thing I will be very interested in seeing is whether these 20 invites will be renewable ala some early Gmail accounts. I know some people who have just sent out their 20 new invites so we will be watching them to see if they do (thanks @bvlad @rcadden and @carlplage). From what I remember of how Gmail invites went the step up will be to 50 invites but it was nearly three years after the launch of Gmail before it fully opened its doors. They did however open it to US residents with a US mobile number after about 16 months. Hopefully Jaiku does not stay closed for this long.

Does this mean Google are getting ready to push Jaiku? We are hearing a lot more from @jyri in relation to what’s going on, then we did in the three months after Google bought Jaiku, even if he can’t seam to hold on to his bags :). So hopefully this is a good sign that things are on the up!

So just over one week has passed since we launched and I am delighted to announce that have created hundreds of new Jaiku users or Jaikuistanis as I have decided to call them. If you don’t agree let me know here. So far we have been able to almost exactly match supply and demand but what is really import is that if you get an invitation through Jaiku Invites please, please come back and share some of them again.

I have to say a huge thanks to all of you who blogged and jaikued about us, your support has been amazing. A huge thanks goes out to people like whatleydude, rcadden, conoro, darla (even though she thought I worked for Jaiku) and PatPhelan (for correcting her) and everyone else who has helped promote us.

So now we will have lots more news to come soon and lots more Jaikustanis being born everyday!

Stay tuned!

CiaranR