Over the next little while we’ll be offering up invitations to various web applications that we’ve been trying out. First up we have invitations available to the temporarily closed micro-blogging service, Jaiku.

Jaiku - What is it?

Jaiku is a bit hard to describe. It’s similar to Twitter, if you’ve heard of that, and can be considered a sort of micro-blog, status updates, activity stream system. Does that make any sense? I thought not. Maybe I should just say that it’s a service for keeping up to date with people, either on the web or via text message on your phone.

Micro-blogging is a new term that’s been thrown around a bit over the last while, and using the SMS format as a basis means that users are limited to 140 characters when they first post. Jaiku allows conversations to develop around these initial posts, with responses being as long as you like, and you can end up with detailed and lengthy conversations distributed amongst many people all around the world.

The people over at Jaiku describe its main goal as being to:

bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds.

Essentially you can send messages to the system by text message, many different instant messaging apps, their website, or one of the various dedicated applications. You link in with other people and add people you wish to follow as contacts. Once you start adding contacts you will get updates when they add a message or something happens in their activity stream.

A bit of history

Based in Helsinki, Jaiku was founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen in February, 2006 and they released their product in July of that year. In October of 2007, Google acquired Jaiku for an undisclosed sum, and had this to say about the aquisition:

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it’s more difficult to keep track of everyone when they’re running around at warp speed. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Interested?

If any of this sounds interesting to you, leave a comment at the end of the post making sure you use a valid email address¹, and we’ll send out an invitation.

Many thanks to Cormac Moylan for the original invite.

1. Your email address is private, and won’t be displayed on our website. We respect your privacy, and will never reveal your information to third parties!