I’m still hugely interested in mobile social software but since I don’t have time to write much of it right now, I’ll content myself with writing about it.
Jaiku is the latest thing to pop onto my radar. At first glance, it’s very much vying with Twitter by using the feed-of-my-friends model but it’s also mixing it with the still-born Nokia presence model. I’m not convinced either is the most natural form for the sort of information that people want to put out.
The reason I’m picking it out is what they’ve done with their downloadable client. This exposes a whole bunch of information from my phone about the last time it was used, whether it’s on silent and even details from my calendar if I let it. The really exciting thing is that it also knows where it is. Admittedly, this is only in terms of the local cell mast; it’s up to me to associate a neighborhood name with it. Just having that handle though provides a whole new range of possibilities that I’m still mulling over.
I’d always assumed that to get this kind of low-level information you’d need some kind of tricky interaction with the networks. I guess Buddyping probably uses something like this to place users but that has it’s own issues which deserve a separate post.
Feel free to add me as a contact, of course: sixball.