Jubii - Not quite, yet

Had another mess around with Jubii. I was hoping the service had improved after its launch a couple of weeks ago. Actually it was the comments in the blogosphere that clarified whether / how some of the functionality worked.

So, it comes from Lycos Europe, it's all Web 2.0:

• You get an email address. When you receive emails, they are divided between a public and private inbox based on whether the sender is in your address book
• Send SMS - not available yet
• VoIP (landline to landline, a la Jahah, rather than using PC's speakers + mic)- 30 mins of free calls per day to Austria, Canada, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK and USA (an interesting mix of countries!). Each call is limited 5 mins. Free while in beta.
• Blogging, photo and file storage and sharing. You can selectively share content with your contacts like etribes or vox (10Gb storage for the first million users)
• Interconnects with AOL & ICQ messengers

Several key features are idenabled yet, launching SMS or VoIP is pretty unintuitive. IE7 reports errors from time to time. Overall, some of the concepts that it is aiming for make lots of sense, something that the original Midentity desktop application was aiming for.

It looks reasonably good, but it's buggy - I'd rather not right it off at this point in time - it might be revved up into something reasonable.

Blogging to peak in 2007??

Gatner (they appear to be busy don't they!) states that the number of blogs will peak at 100 million (widely reported, but see BBC summary). It states that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

So Gartner sees a ceiling approaching. I disagree - I think we'll see an increasing number of people posting online (and not only via the internet, but mobile-based too), but 'blogging', in its current format, implies a continuous stream of thought, expressed freely to all.

But sharing of thoughts and ideas, images and video is both:

• directed (ie to particular people) and
  
• fractured (starts, may last a short period of time and then naturally dies, possibly starts again)

As always, the key is who's in the conversation and context & relevancy. Privacy (or at least the reassurance of the availability of privacy) is very important. That's why services like etribes and vox allow you to create 'channels' for you and your colleagues and friends. (An idea that I endorse - hence the domain that I use here: stream121.)