micro-blogging posts

Jaiku micro-blogging client goes open source

by Brad Linder Mar 15th 2009

Google has released the source code for micro-blogging service Jaiku. The company announced earlier this year that it would cease development of Jaiku. But instead of shutting Jaiku down altogether, Google has moved the project so that it now runs on Google App Engine.

Meanwhile, now that JaikuEngine is avialable to the public, anyone can set up their own version of Jaiku. And developers can help contribute to the project. It should be interesting to see how the project fares. While Twitter certainly dominates the micro-blogging space, it's possible that the new open source nature of Jaiku will make it attractive to open source enthusiasts. There's also the possibility that by making the project open source, developers will contribute new and exciting features more quickly -- but only if a strong developer community grows around JaikuEngine.

Tags: google-app-engine, jaiku, micro-blogging, open-source

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Blip is like Twitter for music, or rather Twitter plus music

by Brad Linder May 14th 2008

If your Twitter home page is filled with messages from friends linking out to other web sites where you can watch a video, read and article, or listen to a song, Blip might be for you. While Twitter is 100% text based, people tend to use the micro-blogging service to share links to multimedia files. Blip, on the other hand, is a micro-blogging service with an integrated music search engine and audio player.

Here's how it works. Once you create an account, you can type the name of a band or song into the "What are you listening to?" box. The question's a bit disingenuous because Blip doesn't really care what you're currently listening to. Instead, it will pull up a bunch of songs matching your query. Thanks to Seeqpod integration, you can actually listen to songs without leaving the web page.

Once you've picked a song, you can enter a short message to go along with your music. When your Blip "listeners" (contacts, followers, whatever you want to call them) login to their home pages they'll see a list of updates from their friends, along with the songs their listening to. Click on any message and the song will start playing.

You can also link Blip to other social networking services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. We tested this out with Twitter, and while Blip did end a message to our Twitter contacts letting them know what we were listening too, it left out the text portion of our Blip.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: blip, micro-blogging, twitter

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software

Jaiku - feature-packed online presence service

by David Chartier Apr 7th 2007

If Twitter and all its buzz in the web community can be considered its own growing world of sorts, then Leo Laporte - one of the service's foremost users according to Twitterholic - just sent ripples through its oceans by announcing his decision to move to Jaiku, a similar service that seems to have longer legs and quite a few more features. Since this was the first we've heard about Jaiku, we couldn't resist swinging by to sign up for an account to see what this micro-blogging, über-status message service has to offer.

In a nutshell: a lot. For starters, Jaiku acts as more of an 'online presence,' allowing you to do things like import RSS feeds from any of your other web properties (including photo feeds from the likes of Flickr) in addition to its fundamental feature of allowing you to post 140-character, SMS-friendly updates of what you're thinking or doing. Jaiku also has refreshing bits of genius sprinkled everywhere, such as the ability to group update notifications via email instead of sending single notices every time any contact posts something. On the downside, however, Jaiku doesn't seem to have nearly as much of a 3rd party following. It has no API (yet), so we're having a hard time finding Jaiku equivalents for TriQQr and the Iconfactory's spectacular Twitterrific client, let alone all the widgets, plugins and mashups which Twitter has quickly grown a reputation for.

Still, Jaiku offers plent of micro-blogging goodness, so give it a spin if Twitter simply isn't offering enough meat to sink your free time into.

Tags: feeds, groovr, import, jaiku, micro blogging, micro-blogging, MicroBlogging, rss, status, twitter

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micro-blogging posts

Jaiku micro-blogging client goes open source

Blip is like Twitter for music, or rather Twitter plus music

Jaiku - feature-packed online presence service

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