Robert Scoble Interviews Finnish And Latvian Startups (Video)
Lots of activity taking place today. A few weeks ago 10 startups with the help of Aalto Venture Garage flew to Silicon Valley to network and raise awareness of the Nordic and Baltic startup ecosystem. That trip already bears fruit in the form of Robert Scoble interviewing some of the startups and the purpose of their trip.
Twitter Moving Towards Jaiku?
The latest storm from the world of Nordic microblogging got me thinking a lot about Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, the microblogging in general and the Open Stack that's trying to open up the silos, not just in microblogging, but the social web in large. We are looking into reaching the point where, just as Jyri Engeström put it, "[n]o single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform"
Now Many have realized that Twitter, which was competing head on with Jaiku and has won that race for now, should allow the service to develop towards what Jaiku did right when it launched, namely enable conversations. I believe those two services are different and perhaps should remain so and just talk to each other via open standards such as XMPP or an XMPP equivalent. Therefore I am not advocating Twitter becoming more Jaiku-like. Twitter should have its own future trajectory. What I am very strongly advocating is for the heavy users of FriendFeed and Twitter to start using Jaiku, the one service that does what services and apps using Twitter API are increasingly trying to do. TweeTree being the most recent example of that. Do I have a vested intrested in this? You can bet on it! I strongly believe Jaiku is a better service to engage in meaningful conversations and I am in Jaiku, but many people I would like to converse with are not.
Below Chris Messina below outlines his vision on where he sees activity streams going. He notes that activity streams need a "[l]ocation and context attached to or as attributes of social objects that are being created" and not just a lonely tweet which is not connected to anything. As Chris mentions in the video below [8min 27 sec into it], this is where Jaiku started from. Now we just need to get Google to realize the value it has in Jaiku and let Jyri & Co. to develop Jaiku further by incorporating filtering (by actor, action, social object, place, time, etc.), fast feed fetching, opening it up for the world to use and develop and voilá. Compare this to the #hashtags, which is about the only thing you can use to put your Tweet into a relevant context. This is really nothing but a poor hack compared to what Jaiku already can do for the conversations.
Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.
Since we are not yet living in a world where all the silos are broken and all the services can talk to each other, I think the Silicon Valley digerati should pull their heads from the California sand, see beyond their Valley bubble and give (yet again) Jaiku collectively a try to realize its value instead of complaining how the Twitter-cum-Jaiku attempts don't work. Yes it's closed, but the invitations are unlimited and I'm sure most of the microblogging heavy users already have an account. If not, I will personally send an invitation to anyone asking for one (you can email me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com). Twitter has the critical mass, but Jaiku still kicks its ass any day as a service to have meaningful conversations in. Since Twitter is not going to become Jaiku any time soon we all should give Jaiku another try. Struggling with two services is a drag, but things are changing fast, and once the users are there, Jaiku and Twitter can complement each other until the two services can openly talk to each other - or until a better option emerges.
Jaiku needs its critical mass and it needs to grow to become truly relevant to link people globally. I am advocating people to move there not only because I or some other people are there, but for the purposes of having conversations, it is a far better service than Twitter or FriendFeed. We should see and use the two services as the different services that they are, just as Eat.fi's founder @Spongefile commented here:
Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.
So how about it Scoble? While we wait for the silos to come down, shall I send you a Jaiku invite?
Finnish Startups Taking A Sauna Truck To LeWeb
ArcticStartup and Digibusiness Helsinki Region are organizing a trip for Finnish startups to LeWeb which takes place in Paris on 9th and 10th December.
LeWeb is the brainchild of Loic le Meur and his wife Geraldine le Meur. Loic is also steering the much talked about startup Seesmic. LeWeb is currently hands down the biggest and most talked about startup event in Europe that features many of the world famous anti-heroes and heroes such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Dan Farber of CNET News, Steve Gillmor of The Gillmor Gang, Om Malik of GigaOm and Robert Scoble of Fast Company along with hundreds of startups.
A group of Finnish startups will invade LeWeb with a massive Sauna Truck. Yes! You heard right, a Sauna Truck! The hottest Finnish social media startups, metaphorically and literally after a few hours in the sauna truck, will combine their efforts at Le Web’08 in Paris in December. The trip is a continuum to a successful joint business trip to the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco last April.
The Finnish startup mafia will arrive in Paris on Monday December 8th and the Sauna will be open for press, bloggers and industry leaders already in the same evening. If you're a Finnish startup and want to tag along contact tommi.rissanen [at] culminatum [dot] fi. There's still room for a few so hurry up!
Hope to see you all in the sauna.
