JaikusReboot just finished. Great speakers, nice people, clever geeks - as usual. I wasn’t disappointed, Mygdal and his crew did a terrific job once again. While I hope to find the find time write a longer article referencing some of my favorite talks, this post is about something else I learned of at Reboot: Jaiku.
Some might say Jaiku is another Web 2.0 fling. Others might call it a Twitter clone. To me, Jaiku is a new way of expressing yourself on the internet. Jaiku let’s you do two things:
- Write short messages (max. 140 characters) that gets published in your stream immediately
- Aggregate all the stuff you publish on the internet; blogs, photos, bookmarks, music, etc.
For instance; at my Jaiku page you can see my latest presence-messages (or micro blog posts or just jaikus), but you’ll also see new blog posts, Flickr photos and del.icio.us books posted by me using those services. Jaiku does this by polling RSS-feeds specified by me in my settings.
While all this is nice, I still consider casperfabricius.com my primary homepage and “me-place”, so I wanted to be able to display my latest jaikus here on my blog. I could do this by using the Jaiku Wordpress plugin, but that makes a server-side call to Jaiku on each page request, slowing my site down. For this reason, I opted to use Jaikus brilliant JSON API in order to let the magic happen client-side.
I wrote this javascript, and added the following HTML to my main index and page templates:
<!-- In the <head> section --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/myjaikus.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://[Insert your Jaiku username here].jaiku.com/feed/json?callback=MyJaikus.storeJaikus"></script> <!– In the menu, where I wanted the Jaikus to appear –> <ul id="jaikus"> </ul>
This javascript will, if you remember to put in your own user name and add an empty unordered list with the id jaikus, insert the three newest of your jaikus. Neat, eh?
Jaiku ressources
- JaikuFans.com
- Very cool Jaiku Quicksilver plugin (I use it all the time)
- Wordpress plugin
JSON is great for stuff like that… I’m rather impressed with jaiku, especially love the aggregation feature. And the s60 phone app is quite impressive as well. Time will tell how much I’ll be using it though.
A twitter clone? I’m not sure, but didn’t Jyri present jaiki on last years’ reboot? How long has twitter been around? Anyhow, the aggregator is a major difference between the two, and is what makes this thing tick for me.
That said, I’ve had my eyes on using tumblr.com as an aggregator/microblogging tool for a while.
Comment by Björn Rixman — June 4, 2007 @ 2:45 am
You are probably right, Björn. Don’t really remember, though. Gonna check out tumblr.com :)
Comment by Casper Fabricius — June 5, 2007 @ 2:48 am