Legal Research

Jaiku?s dead, Long live Jaiku?

By scott

Google has announced that it is pulling the plug on Jaiku - the once very promising Twitter competitor. Or, at least, it is stopping developing it as an ‘official google service’ - along with doing the same or killing off: Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball and the Google Mashup Editor. (although some of these will all still have some Google input as a 20% project by Googlers). With Jaiku, Google plans to release it into the Open Source community. According to the announcement the new open source Jaiku Engine project will appear on Google Code under the Apache License 2.0. According to Google this move will allow organizations, groups and individuals to be able to “roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine”. [The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth] So, Jaiku will now live or die down to whether there is enough community interest to work on it an improve the service.

I must admit to being surprised by this announcement. I was interested and excited when Goodle bought Jaiku back in October 2007, whilst it was still an invitation only service (it still is). At the time I thought they had bought the best product on the market (and I have said since that I still think it is better) I had always though that the plan for Jaiku was to either exploit the mobile market - and add it as a key component of Android or to make it part of their Google Apps suite and target businesses and use behind the firewall. So, is this Google admitting that it backed the wrong horse and SHOULD have bought Twitter? - perhaps it still will? Or is this Google realising there is no way to make any money on Microblogging, and it is better off not even trying?

Steve Rubel thinks that Google has not finished here and that the development cull may continue. He suggests Google Reader could be next for the development kill off? I’m not sure I am buying that one, although I can certainly see it becoming less of a priority.

So, what will an open source Jaiku rise from the ashes? People are not exactly falling over themselves to desert Twitter for identi.ca, so unless the market is the enterprise market, I would not hold my breath.

My Jaiku timeline.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 15, 2009 (boomark / email).