Interview with the creator of Juick

If suddenly you have not heard about Juick : it is a microblogging service based on Jabber / XMPP technology, which can be used directly from your favorite IM client. Read more ...

I, Anton Ugnich , the head of Juick.com , invited my readers to play in an “interview”: they asked questions about the service and here I offer you the answers to some of them.

@lsd : How did you get the idea to create Juick and why such a name?
Once, back in the 2008th year, I was tired of pressing Ctrl-V, sending another interesting link to my friends and acquaintances, and I decided to make a service that would do it for me.
Jabber / XMPP was and remains the only open popular IM protocol, which allows you to develop a service, rather than fix endless errors after the next update of the proprietary protocol.
As for the name “Juick”, it was invented on a single naming service for money. The main condition was a free short domain in the zone. Com. Most often, people decode it as "Jabber, qUICK", but, honestly, I myself do not know what this name means. :)
')
@ ivan101 : Why is it needed?
Jabber is, first of all, the exchange of personal messages between two people. Juick allows you to communicate to any number of users. This is very convenient if you need to ask a question or share the news.
In addition to regular text messages, Juick allows you to transfer photos and videos, specify the geo-coordinates for the message. Agree, it is much easier to gather friends in a cafe by sending them a photo of an appetizing pizza or a sweaty glass of amber-colored foaming drink, and indicating the point on the map where you are waiting for them. ;)
In addition, it is very convenient to keep a diary in Dzhuik: from any jabber-client, from any mobile device. As soon as you have a thought or something happened - you can immediately write it down.

@lsd : How many people participated in the development of Juick?
Directly on the service I work alone. But Juick is not only a website and a jabber bot, it’s also plugins for popular IM clients, a lot of services and sites that dozens of people from all over the world are working on. So, we are many. :)

@tilarids : Describe the technical part that provides the service. Number of servers, their roles, used technologies and PL.
Despite the fact that the database already has almost 2 million messages and more than 10 thousand new ones are added every day, Juick still works on a very modest VPS. However, we will soon move to a dedicated server, it’s much cheaper to add RAM, which requires quite a lot for the DBMS.
Most of the code is written in Perl, in some places C ++ is used. The jabber server role is performed by jabberd2 , the DBMS is MySQL, the web server is nginx.
A little later I will try to make a separate detailed article on the architecture of Dzhuika. ;)

@ al1k : How much space do all the Dzhuik data now occupy? And in %% ratio, if possible. Posts \ Comments \ Pictures \ Audio \ Video.
Text messages in the database occupy approximately 0.5 GB, of which a quarter are posts, the rest are comments.
5 thousand photos with previews occupy about 1GB. The ability to send video and audio appeared later, these files "weigh" a little more than 200MB.
And on the server are stored avatars of 8 thousand users in 3 sizes, it turns out more than 150MB.

@mightymind : How is Juick monetized?
There are no annoying banners or advertising links on Juik. The project is monetized exclusively through paid accounts with advanced features. The main such opportunity is to send an unlimited number of photos and videos. Media content consumes quite a lot of resources and traffic, so it is quite reasonable and fair that the active use of these resources should be paid for.
There are still some plans to make a profit related to geolocation, but for now it is too early to talk about it.

@Heni : What are the steps for the future development of Juick, what features will be changed or added to the service?
Despite the fact that there are a lot of interesting ideas, in the near future all forces will be directed to the refinement and improvement of existing functions: search by messages and users, advanced output of business cards (VCard) users, XMPP API , geolocation.
As I said before, Juick is not only a website and a bot, but also a multitude of customers through which users “communicate” with the service. XMPP is a very flexible protocol with a huge variety of functions, but sometimes the implementation of these functions in clients leaves much to be desired. Since Juick is almost the only major service that actively uses advanced XMPP functionality, you have to communicate with client developers yourself: search for errors together, persuade new functions to be implemented, etc. This direction will be given much attention in the future. For example, I recently offered a monetary reward for finalizing the popular open source client Bombus, and I plan in the same vein to continue helping the OpenSource community.

@baadoo : Is gating to other services (LJ, Delicious, Twitter, etc.) planned or will it be a lot of third-party services?
Cross-posting on Twitter and Facebook has been around for quite some time. There are no plans to create new “gates”, but the architecture of the service and the use of simple data formats (RSS and XMPP are based on XML) allow anyone who wants to cross-post to any other service. For example, based on the source code of the above mentioned bot for cross-posting on Twitter.

@ nixon89 : Will there be a special client for Jooik? It seems there were some rumors about what you are doing it.
This is not just a rumor, I regularly write about it on the blog and post the assembly. :)
I deal with clients for J2ME phones and devices on the Android platform . There are also plans to have a “desktop” client for Windows / Linux / MacOS, some work has already been done, but for now there is nothing to show.
I think Habr's readers will be interested to know that these three clients use the same Java library to work with XMPP, which works on J2ME, Android, Windows, Linux and MacOS without code modification: Juick / XMPP API .

@Totktonada : Do you plan to open the source when Juick is perfect and there are a lot of users?
Juick is not a set of scripts, like Wordpress, but a centralized service, and a rather complicated one. Therefore, there will be little benefit from opening the source code. At the same time, to open the code, you first need to properly execute it, make at least minimal documentation, etc. - all this takes quite a lot of time.
Where it is appropriate, I always try to contribute to the cause of Open Source: I send patches to Jabber servers, clients and libraries, I post the source codes of my programs. I think this benefits much more.

That's all for today. :) Soon I will try to please you with an article about the architecture and the internal structure of the service with a bunch of technical details that you love so much. In the meantime, you can start your blog on Juik and join the ranks of fans of the company on Habré . ;)