I'm torn on the subject of Jaiku and similar services. I'm very fascinated by Jaiku - I really want all my friends to use it, but they don't. My contact list is empty. Therefore, Jaiku is useless (albeit fascinating) to me.
I've tried convincing a few friends to start using Jaiku, but I haven't had any luck with that so far. Which comes as no surprise. Why should they use it? So they can keep track of where I am and what I'm doing all the time? What's the point? There would be a point if Jaiku allowed them to keep track of all their friends, or at least many of them. But that's not going to happen - even if you do have a friend that's interested, he or she probably doesn't have an S60 phone anyway, so they can't run the software. That's the problem with Jaiku according to me - to get lots of users, it first needs to have lots of users. Typical moment 22.
But maybe I'm missing something. Perhaps Jaiku users don't typically use Jaiku to keep track of their real life friends (since they're hard to get to start using Jaiku for the above reasons) - perhaps they find new friends on Jaiku that they add to their contact list? But if that's the case, how do you find people with similar interests to yours on Jaiku? It's not like you can search for users filtering by interest or location.
And now for my pet peevee about Jaiku Mobile: Why on earth doesn't it have instant messaging to your Jaiku contacts? Sure you can send them an SMS, but you can do that without Jaiku too. If you could send an IM using Jaiku (basically for free, not counting traffic charges), then that would be a selling point that I could use to convince my real life friends (those who actually have S60 phones) to start using Jaiku - free instant messaging! But no, for some reason Jaiku doesn't have that.
So, please tell me, how do you guys use Jaiku - because, as I understand it, Jaiku is a major thing in the S60 world?