A little while ago we created a Eurovision commentary channel on Jaiku to enable live commenting around this camp megaspectacle, which is taking place in Helsinki this year.

Around the same time I read a story about the global Finnish humor ambassador Markku from Finland, whose videos had risen among the top 100 most popular comedy clips on YouTube. Although I had never yet met the group behind Markku I could immediately identify with their style. It turned out Markku was getting his own morning show on SubTV, Finland’s leading youth TV channel.

One thing led to another, and soon I was talking with the SubTV head of programming about getting Markku on Jaiku. She thought it was a cool idea, and when Markku’s creators Teemu Niukkanen and Antti Toivonen agreed to go for it we did. Markku started posting on Jaiku pretty much right away, and we issued a press release with SubTV a few days later.

Meanwhile, someone had posted on Jaiku’s Eurovision channel that it’d be cool to get the 2006 Eurovision winner Lordi, a Finnish monster rock group, to join as a commentator. Before I knew it another Jaiku user, Lordi’s good friend Sami Keinänen was driving me to meet the monster. Mr. Lordi, who unmasked is the brilliant vocalist-crafter Tomi Putaansuu, personally liked the idea, and suddenly an international monster superstar was candidly sharing his pre-Eurovision musings on Jaiku in the unimitable style of Northern Finns.

Yesterday during the live broadcast of the Eurovision semi-finals everything sort of came together as Lordi, Markku, and a slew of witty commentators like Arttu Tolonen, Liisa Jokinen, Gita Vainola, and many others let themselves loose on the Jaiku backchannel. The amazing part is how quickly and effortlessly the organizing went – almost as if the pieces of the puzzle assembled themselves. Lordi will open the Eurovision finals tomorrow evening, and we’ll be hosting a Jaiku party at Korjaamo in Helsinki with screens showing the live broadcast and the live commentary on Jaiku. If you’re in town for the event, this is probably not a bad way to experience the spectacle.

The Eurovision Commentary channel on Jaiku: jaiku.com/channel/esc

Markku from Finland on Jaiku: markku.jaiku.com

Mr. Lordi on Jaiku: lordi.jaiku.com

UPDATE: Jaiku is now back up and running.

UPDATE2: The reason of the crash was evidently a traffic spike from badges, Nebula was responsive alhtough it took a while to get through to them on the phone

Jaiku.com is currently down due to what appears to be a force majeur of some sort at Nebula the hosting company. We’re investigating.

Leo Laporte the charismatic tech conversationalist and owner of TWiT network of online media announced on his blog he’d moved to Jaiku. He can be found at chieftwit.jaiku.com

Leo’s announcement generated a flow of traffic to Jaiku. The database server went on its knees for a short while but thanks to Andrew, Andy, and Petteri we were back up and running reasonably quickly.

In the 24 hours following Leo’s move we’ve been getting a lot more traffic, new users, and blog coverage than ever in Jaiku’s history. Here are a few notable picks of commentary:

An interview on Jaiku on 606tech

Robert Scoble polemizes Laporte’s decision

Technology Evangelist asks how volatile are the social networks

also, there are fresh reviews of Jaiku Mobile on SMS Text News. Here are the first impressions and here’s the second review, two weeks on

We’ll be doing our best to keep the site up and responsive through Easter, and start adding more hardware in the days that follow. As for myself, I’m going to get some sleep now. Folks who wondered why our head of ops is on the other side of the world, now you know :)

MSN has posted a short video interview about my talk on designing services around social objects, recorded at their Innovate event in Stockholm in December.

A video and MP3 of the full talk are up on the Innovate site.

Swedish blogger Fredrik Wass has also uploaded a clip on YouTube that includes my answer to a question from the audience on what’s going to happen next in the social networking service space.

France’s leading blogger-entrepreneur Loic Lemeur delivers: Le Web 3 final program is out and reads like it’ll be a conference worthy of note. I’m fortunate to be speaking in the “Mobile networking objects and people” session with two fantastic speakers and great friends, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Felix Petersen CEO of Plazes. Can’t wait!

UPDATE: Sign up to Innovate here.

I’ll be speaking at the MSN-sponsored Innovate event in Stockholm on Thursday, December 7th. The talk will be a fresh new one on social objects.

Informed commentators like Anne Galloway, Nat Torkington, Russ Beattie, Stowe Boyd, Noah Brier, James Boardwell and others have responded to the idea of object-centered sociality in thoughtful, provocative ways, and I’d like to acknowledge that and build on the feedback I think has value.

Many consider it a useful approach, but so far we’ve been missing a concise set of claims – call them guidelines, rules, best practices, or any such thing – about the design of successful social objects. In the talk I plan to suggest an agenda for designers: point out the most important aspects of social object-centered design and show real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t.

If you’re in Stockholm on Thursday, I hope to see you at the event at Grand Hotel.

I’m in London for a few days to work on the next version of Thinglink with Ulla-Maaria and Matt Biddulph. We’ll be stationed at the Moo HQ – thanks to the Moo team for kindly offering us their meeting room.

Notes from a panel with Stewart Butterfield (Flickr/Yahoo), Mike Iampietro (Adobe), Terence Swee (Muvee), Richard Ting (R/GA ad agency)

What trends are you seeing in the development of user-generated content?

Stewart: Just to make the panel more interesting I’ll start by disagreeing with the question. Personally I hate the phrase ‘user-generated content’ because it doesn’t accurately describe the activity of these people. When you’re in the media business you talk about content, with the idea that it fills up some vessel that you can then make money off of by selling advertising around it. To the people on these services it’s not about content it’s about participating in an activity.

To answer the question, we’re observing three trends on Flickr:
1) Ubiquity of capturing devices. People have cameras in their pockets all the time
2) Spread of the network. 10 years ago it was unusual to have internet, now it’s everywhere
3) Change in perception of what it means to participate in activities online. 10 years ago the public perception of the internet user was a creepy ugly fat man in the basement of his house. Today it’s considered normal and most people use online services including dating services for instance.

Terence: The Office TV show campaign. They posted short clips on YouTube, people voted which one gets shown on TV.

Role of DRM
Stewart: There’s a need to help the people on Flickr protect themselves from commercial exploitation. When there’s an invitation to have people submit their content it usually works pretty well. Nikon got 50,000 photos from Flickr users when it issued a campaign.

Terence: At Muvee we recognized we need to be on the same side with content owners like Warner Music. For example you can personalize your Madonna video. We can add value to premium content by allowing users to personalize it.

Do you have stories of people who’ve made an income from their content?
Terence: Wedding videographers use our software because it means you can have the church ceremony in the morning and show the video at lunchtime. Wedding videographers charge money for the ‘instant service’.

Richard: My New York friends Josh Rubin of Coolhunting and another friend who runs a sneaker blog called FreshnessMag. The blogs started as just something they were interested in and have evolved into businesses with advertising and services related to the topic they cover.

Stewart: We see this all the time on Flickr. A lot of people in the media business search for photos and contact the users when they want to purchase them. A friend of mine traveled in Southeast Asia and got contacted 25 times because he took such interesting photos. We hear about it maybe a dozen or two dozen times a day and it’s having a signigicant impact.

What’s the future for a company like Getty Images?
Stewart: Flickr’s pretty disruptive. Getty’s also active, they acquired iStockphoto a service where people can post photos and sell rights to use them commercially. Right now there are about 26 million photos on Flickr under the Creative Commons license. So there’s a growing body of photos available for free use and this is quite disruptive.

Richard: We have about 150 designers in our studio and they often download photos for use in non-commercial presentations. Before Flickr we used Getty and others, and Flickr’s just a lot better.

Question from the audience: Is there any business model for operators regarding Flickr on Nokia handsets?

Stewart: One of the reasons consumers like Flickr is because they get around having to pay MMS charges. There may be other business models that don’t require charging consumers directly.

Mike: Anything that encourages usage is revenue to the operators. Outside that there may not be much in the form of revenue share.

Anssi Vanjoki is EVP & head of Multimedia at Nokia. Rough notes from his talk:

“I’m going to walk you through a day in the life of four people whose lives are enriched by Web 2.0 type services”

Jason, a journalist in London
– is very social, likes to be with other people
– wakes up to the sound of his multimedia computer
– has set up a task in 43things(woot Robots!) using WidSets
– in his home he has Wi-Fi and he goes to Google Video to download a video of a blowfish (fugu)
– he uses MSN Messenger to chat on his phone
– He has N93, he watches Mission Impossible 3 on the plane

Sanna, software developer in Helsinki
– uses N770 Wi-Fi tablet
– she finds the N770 elegant
– listens to Internet radio
– uses Web browser to check Amsterdam on Lonely Planet

Michael, publisher(?) in Brussels
– uses N95 because he likes it’s so powerful
– IMs with Jason to play a round of golf before their fugu party, sends geotag to him
– Listens to podcast in the car

Emily, model scout in Amsterdam
– reads IHT using Channels app
– Uses N93 to take photos, uploads to Flickr

Meanwile at the golf course

“I personally took up golf after 25 years of pressure from my friends last summer and discovered it’s very difficult” :)

– They use a golf trainer app on their phones to improve their swing
– Use Catalog to find & download Tiger Woods Golf game

At the clubhouse, there’s open Wi-Fi. They use Gizmo to make a VoIP call to the girls to bypass roaming costs

Emily uses the barcode scanner on the N93 to check if the coffee is Fair Trade

They all meet for their fugu party in Amsterdam. The Web brought them together and their multimedia computers keep them connected

After the event their photos are available for display and printing on the Web

“I’ve just gone through a day in the life of four technology leaders. All the functions are in the devices and all those services are on the Web. What they enjoy the rest of us will be enjoying in a few years’ time. Just like 10 years ago we introduced narrowband sockets out of which WAP came out. Around that time the first decent Web browsers arrived. If I had told this stuff then, you’d have thought ‘Anssi is anybody home?'”

“To learn about the future, it’s important to look back. Try to memorize something from 1996. How was the world then? It wa very different. The leaders were downloading ringtones to their phones.”

“Be careful – don’t be left behind”

N95 highlight. “The centerpiece of Web2,0 behavior. The information retrieval tool and repository has become a social place. There’s no such thing as mobile internet, there’s only one Internet. You discover things and share them, that’s what you do with these devices. It’s the only channel you need. You can use other resources like screens with this device. You can use downtime for relaxation or productive work. It makes your life easier and more fun.”

“We think our slogan ‘connecting people’ is more true today than it was when we took it up 15 years ago. Web 2.0 is all about connecting people and social interaction.”

CTO Tero Ojanperä gave a refreshing closing keynote at Nokia World. He has a fun presentation style and there were lots of concrete examples. Here are my notes.

The Nokia World conference day in 2010 according to Tero:
– Wake up to your favorite MP3
– Check your favorite feeds
– Navigate to the conference
– Capture HDTV video on your phone
– Device finds your nearest coffee machine, order it using your phone

The key trends:
– Converged devides go mainstream
– Wireless braodband becomes universal
– Innovation proliferates
– Mobility transforms the internet
– Context is king

“Converged devices with open OS” will outsell laptops in 2007. They’ll replace the whole installed base of the PC market in 5 years. This will be a big change in how you access the internet.

* Media: Indexed, follows user. 100+hrs of music, 3D cinema surround
* Camera: mainstream products have 5MP, lead products 10MP & HDTV
* Display: mainstream products QVGA, DVD-quality video mainstream. Lead products: VGA, 3D console graphics, projection(!)
* Storage: mainstream products: 8GB, leading produtcs: 50-100 GB

Network:
2006 GSM/WCGM capacity doubles, <50ms latency
2007 I-HSPA: cost vanishes, flat arhitecture, halverd netowrk CAPEX
2008 HSUPA.
…

Innovations in the pipeline:
– Graphical notephonebook allows people who can’t read to use the phone
– Flashlight
– Speaking clock
– Location and context based services and content
– Mobile / Internet TV, podcasting
– NFC ticketing, payments & service discovery
– Wibree connects low-power devices

Mobility transforms the Internet
– 1st wave was about eliminating the middlemen
– 2nd wave was about communities and user-generated content. This is Web 2.0
– 3rd wave will “take the Internet from the PC scale, which is in the millions, to mobile scale, which is in the billions. Mobility will fundamentally change the Internet. It’ll be a completely new experience. It’s happening today as we speak. If you’re skeptical, consider some examples:
* we’ve turned the mobile phone into an Internet server (open source
* the mobile browser is turning into a developer platform. This will allow Web services, mash-ups, widgets
* Integrated mobile UI”

Smart technologies adapt to me and my context
– Smart spaces: Web of things, wireless mash-ups, digital me in a virtual home/office
– Smart senses: Motion sensors, haptics, multinsensory telepresence, centext automatics, invisible computing
– Smart sharing: Blogs & buddies, metadata, content search / match, memory/language/story prosthesis

Sensors: “We call it the 6th sense. It’s going to happen in the next 3 years”
Storage: The device is going to act as your memory prosthesis. It’ll remember all the things you did: things you saw, calls you made, who you met. Easy search & retrieval will be key.