It’s a Jaiku Moment!
So while I was kicking around in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island last week, I was delighted to have been able to meet up with my good friend (and Mobile Monday London Irregular) Margaret Gold. Turns out Margaret was in town for the weekend for her parents’ anniversary. It was a true “Jaiku moment” – a completely unplanned meet-up that only happened because I had written about my itinerary on Jaiku. Now, social networking services can often result in serendipitous events in the real world, but the mobile-focused nature of Jaiku (the fact, in this case, that I could keep a continuous Jaiku thread going through my trip using only my Nokia N73) and the tendency of mobile social services to focus on location and proximity tend to accentuate this feature. There’s also a lesson to learn about privacy here. In the past, it’s been quite taboo to reval publicly that you’re going to be away from home (someone might break into your house!) But social media like Jaiku (or Facebook or whatever) changes our perception of what information should be private and public. In this case, disclosing private information into the public sphere led to a meeting with a good friend and some good discussion. Was that worth the potential risk of disclosing this private information? I think it was.