On Message with Ben Gross

Jaiku is a platform for managing distributed presence, location, and status information. The service was publicly launched at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference in February. The service has since released public APIs and a few dozen applications have now integrated Jaiku via its APIs. Mashable has an article listing 19 tools for Jaiku and the official Jaiku developer site lists even more.

Jaiku is often listed as a Twitter competitor although the service has a somewhat different angle. To this effect, a number of the third party applications created using the Jaiki API are mashups between Jaiku and Twitter. Jaiku feels closer to an IM client that focuses on presence and location information in what would be the IM status field, rather than broadcasting “What are you doing now” to all contacts and followers such as twitter does.

Jaiku is based out of Finland and has a more international, in particular European focus than Twitter. The primary mobile Jaiku application is targeted at Nokia’s series 60 platform. The mobile application also supports a “people nearby” function using Bluetooth. The service is currently free.

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