jaiku invites

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