jaiku invites

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.

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?