As Paul noted this weekend, Jaiku was completely down for scheduled maintenance over the weekend, with very little explanation other than it was a good time to go speak with a loved one. A lot was made of this by the few left in the blogosphere who use the service to fill their status microblogging needs, particularly how interesting it was that a Twitter-ish bird was doing the downtime notice, and how insulting it was to be told by Jaiku that they perhaps don’t spend enough time functioning in meatspace.
They’re back now, and they’re purporting to be offering unlimited invitesto the private beta service. I’m still skeptical this is the case, since I’ve been on the “waiting list” to join Jaiku since the months before they were acquired by Google. I even re-submitted my application for an invite the moment I saw their blog post on the re-opening hit my feed this afternoon. Clearly the process hasn’t been fully automated yet, as I haven’t received a confirmation email.
Regardless of the true status of the open-ness, they say they’re ready to handle any volume. The purpose of the downtime was to move the service “to a Google data center,” something “that [they]’d planned to do anyway, as part of the future transition to Google App Engine.”
If indeed Jaiku throws wide open the doors to the service for the masses, this will be an interesting real-world stress test for not only Google’s version of Twitter but the Google App Engine itself. So far, very little in the way of high profile, high traffic stuff has proclaimed itself to be running on Google’s cloud computing option. Those looking to evaluate it as a solution for their company would do well to watch how Jaiku performs in their “new nest.”
In a lot of ways I am really glad that my children have grown and left home. When they were growing up all we as parents had to worry about was sex, drugs and rock n‘ roll. Now parents have to worry about sex, drugs and the Internet – or at least the bad and evil Internet as propagated by the mainstream media.
Where once the evils of IRC (internet relay chat for you young ‘uns out there) and ICQ are now replaced by MySpace stalking, Bebo suicides, and Second Life drugs and porn. Next, it will be the dangers of Twitter and the hidden terrors of Facebook. It is all about using scare tactics to drive up rating but in the end parents are left scared and not knowing what to do.
The fact is that with our constant push forward with social media and the increasing move to live our lives openly on the web the truths behind some of these big media scare tactics will happen more and more. Michael Masnick points to a recent study bemoaning the fact that the parents aren’t living up to their responsibilities by monitoring their kids.
I am sure that the folks in Cupertino thought the whole idea of the App Store for the iPhone would be a great idea and in fact has proven to be a great money maker. At the same time though it has also turned out to be one of their biggest headaches that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. While some developers have been making money hand over fist others have been dealing with long approval wait periods or just having their applications pulled. Often those being pulled are being left in limbo as to why and what needs to be done to get back on the marketplace.
The most recent incident of an application being pulled though is raising the specter of Apple censorship; or at least applying their own moral judgement of whether an application can be listed. Such is the case of Infurious Comics and their Comic Reader that was meant for easier distribution and reading of web comics on the iPhone. Where they got in hot water with Apple though is that the application comes with a free issue of Infurious’ web comic Murderdrome an admittedly dark and bloody comic.
The battle lines have been drawn today. You’re with us or you’re against us. You’re cool and hip or lame and square. No, I’m not talking about political lines (for once), I’m talking about the early adopters versus the mainstream, or as Robert Scoble framed it: the passionates versus the non-passionates.
What, though, is a passionate (sometimes referred to as an ‘evangelist’)? What is the definition of an early-adopter?
Quite simply, and perhaps obviously, it’s a person who embraces new technology before most other people do. Early adopters tend to buy or try out new hardware items and programs, and new versions of existing programs, sooner than most of their peers. Continue Reading4 Questions for Every Early Adopter
Editor’s Note:This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
20 word description: Oriango is a Dictionary Style Search Engine. With Oriango you can perform searches, add and share the Web alphabetically.
CEO’s Pitch: Oriango was created to present a new search tool, making the users its only concern. The user chooses the content, and the editor makes it relevant throughout the quality of its content description.
All the information added to Oriango is arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary, this way it is certain that only the name or the title will matter, allowing independence on their choices. Therefore it’s the user that chooses what is cool, not a group selection, votes or PageRank. The search is performed only on the information added by the users, not showing irrelevant or external content.
Mashable’s Take: Does it make sense to organize the Web in alphabetical order? A new site called Oriango seems to think so. Such an organizational strategy has been set forth by Oriango in order to put control back into the hands of the consumers when it comes to search results. I know what you’re thinking… no, it doesn’t make sense. Especially in this day and age where a website name may have little indication as to the site’s function, and may not even be a real word.
Why should you put a dent in your wallet when there are so many great free applications out there for the iPhone and iPod Touch? There are tons of games for the devices, but the vast majority of them cost money, so we’ve sorted through and located 12 totally free ones for you to throw on your gadgets and entertain yourself throughout the day.
Unlike with Firefox or WordPress addons, where we always tell you not to load everything we list, there doesn’t seem to be any problem with loading lots of iPhone or iPod Touch apps. Just make sure you have enough memory for the programs and you can easily load all 12 of these on your device.
Originally this list included Tris, but with yesterday’s news that it would be removed we took it off the list. It’s really too bad as it was a great port of the game.
Blanks - A simple word game that gives you a definition and four choices as to what the word may be. Fun and educational all at once.
Lifestreaming service FriendFeed has launched a variety of widgets (available here) for showing off your activities on your own blog or website. The two most significant widgets are the Badge, which shows off all of the different services you’ve synced with the site, and the Feed Widget, which displays your most recent activities.
Personally I’m a big fan of the Badge concept (which has been tried previously by others), as it should make it super easy for people to connect with me on the various services I frequent, minus Facebook of course (unfortunately, it seems to break when I embed it here, but you can see it on the right or add me on friendfeed here).
There’s also a widget for showing your most recent status update (via Twitter or an alternative status service), a chiclet that simply links to your profile, and a “Share on FriendFeed” link you can use to encourage your readers to distribute your content on the aggregator.
While you could already do some of this on your own by using the RSS feeds that FriendFeed provides, the widgets are simply copy and paste embed code. If they prove popular, it will certainly get FriendFeed in front of a lot more eyeballs, giving the site an opportunity to gain all of those mainstream users that tech bloggers love to wax poetic about. For Facebook users, Friendfeed already has an application for showing off your activities, but its growth may be inhibited by the fact that Facebook now offers a comparable set of features.
The recently more Web-savvy John McCain campaign has re-launched its social network – McCainSpace – and it’s actually pretty good. The site is powered by KickApps, and includes standard social networking features like forums, groups, and plenty of user-generated content.
What’s impressive about the new McCainSpace is the viral potential it unleashes for the campaign. For instance, the Groups feature includes a “Hillary Supports for McCain” – which, apparently there are still plenty of according to recent polls. There are also groups for McCain supporters in every state, allowing them to organize and discuss their campaign efforts. Meanwhile, all of the videos users upload are embeddable, meaning they can be spread via blogs and social networks. McCain introduces the social network in the video below:
While the Obama campaign has been largely praised for its use of the Web and has a strong social network of its own (My.BarackObama.com), McCain’s first attempt at online community was not a strong one. I was recently quoted as calling the first version of the site, which launched early this year, “virtually impossible to use and appear[ing] largely abandoned,” which it was.
So you run a website and really like the social software that enables your visitors to interact with things you produce. But you want to take that connection with the crowd to a more mobile position. Perhaps you’d like some sort of arrangement which allows interested parties to send and receive messages to and from your domain, and preferably something that costs you no financial investment to establish. Enter, Zeep Mobile.
What Zeep provides, in short, is an API. Pretty much any developer can implement the API, and do so freely and easily. With “no volume restrictions,” either. How it works is fairly simple.
Everything operates via a five-digit SMS code: 88147. This is used for messages sent out to users of websites and vice versa. The entry of a “website prefix” helps direct inbound communications. And Zeep is said to be able to connect with “all major carriers in the US,” so it’s bound to work for most who fancy the bridge it provides. The only outstanding concern is the cost to receive SMS messages. In the case of site owners, that’s mostly a non-issue. For site users, however, that’s a hurdle that some just won’t jump. Mobile phone users in international reaches may be the beneficiaries of a free-receive promise from their respective carriers, but here in the US, carriers tend to refuse any differentiation between the ins and the outs.
Zeep’s influence obviously can only stretch so far, so one will have to take a glass-half-full approach to this. Inasmuch as Zeep serves its first list of clients - website owners - there will be ample cheers for no-pay.
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I am sure that the folks in Cupertino thought the whole idea of the App Store for the iPhone would be a great idea and in fact has proven to be a great money maker. At the same time though it has also turned out to be one of their biggest headaches that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. While some developers have been making money hand over fist others have been dealing with long approval wait periods or just having their applications pulled. Often those being pulled are being left in limbo as to why and what needs to be done to get back on the marketplace.
Why should you put a dent in your wallet when there are so many great free applications out there for the iPhone and iPod Touch? There are tons of games for the devices, but the vast majority of them cost money, so we’ve sorted through and located 12 totally free ones for you to throw on your gadgets and entertain yourself throughout the day.
Personally I’m a big fan of the Badge concept (which has been tried previously by others), as it should make it super easy for people to connect with me on the various services I frequent, minus Facebook of course (unfortunately, it seems to break when I embed it here, but you can see it on the right or add me on friendfeed 
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