Shoeboxes Leading to Jaiku

I was looking at the page views for some of the posts I've put up on this blog and the">http://phoneboy.info/a-shoebox-of-memories">the one where my wife brought back a shoebox full of memories from Hawaii to me seems unusually popular. Quite honestly, I'm not sure why since it really wasn't intended to be something I expected a large number of people to be interested in.

It does seem strange condensing a whole chunk of memories into something the size of a shoebox. Or even stranger that now that shoebox can live as an archive of digital files.

One of these archives I had a reason to run across recently was the archive of photos I uploaded to the now defunct Share on Ovi service that Nokia used to operate.

While preparing PhoneBoy Speaks Ep 306, I had reason to go back through a couple of older posts of mine, some of which linked to photos that were posted on this service. I noticed that it wasn't a whole ton of posts that needed fixing and figured I might as well clean them up.

One of the posts was actually my review of my favorite Nokia handset, the Nokia E71. More specifically, I reviewed the North America edition of the Nokia E71. This post had screenshots, as you might expect, but one in particular caught my attention:

Most of you may not know, or even remember this service, but that green J icon was for the Jaiku app on my home screen. Jaiku was a mobile-first social app for Symbian devices developed by a couple of Finns.

The service eventually got bought, and neglected, by Google, much to the dismay of fans like myself. But I met a lot of really interesting people on Jaiku, and had a lot of excellent conversations and am "still friends" with many people from Jaiku.

I can see echoes of that experience today on app.net (where I'm ) but I never really made that connection until just now.

Amazing what memories a (virtual) shoebox brings up!