I accidentally in your base

Does anybody want an invite to Jaiku? It's roughly speaking a cross between LJ and Twitter - a microblogging service, accessible from your mobile (I know there's a S60 client and mobile Java client which will work on most high-end phones, not sure what others exist) and the web, you can send SMS to it, and it can send SMS to you but most people disable that feature so it's not annoying (unlike Twitter, which can wind people up if they have active friends on there).

Your initial post to a Jaiku thread is limited to 140ish characters (similar to Twitter in that respect), but then there's a comments thread under each initial post, and they're unlimited... so you get more interesting discussions on there than on Twitter, and more potential for finding new interesting people in the same way that you can on LJ, when they comment on one of your friend's posts.

It has some interesting extra features, such as letting you set your location, which it remembers from then on in relation to whichever mobile network cell you were near at the time. So for instance, whenever I'm visiting denari, anyone using Jaiku can tell that I'm in 'Manor House' and take a fair guess at where I might be. It also can tell people who I'm with, if we all have Jaiku installed and bluetooth turned on at the time. Stalkers delight! :)

Seriously though, it's a nice little service, and I recommend checking it out to anyone who thought Twitter was a neat idea but a bit rough around the edges in actual use... Jaiku smooths a lot of those edges off quite nicely.

Update: Forgot to mention, in case it wasn't clear - you probably don't want to use Jaiku unless you have a decent phone and a data bundle of some kind - it goes through maybe 5 or 10MB a month in casual use, potentially a lot more if you have a lot of friends and leave it turned on all the time.


I've got 10 3 invites to hand out - if nobody claims them by the weekend, I'm going to stick them on an invite-sharing site for random people to use.