Jyri Engestrom on Jaiku’s Future

In the barrage of announcements made earlier this week by Google, where they apparently were jettisoning a long list of questionable products or at least gulagging them, several members of the commentariat went a bit overboard and said that Jaiky was being deadpooled. In fact, it is being converted into an open source project (see Google Shake Up: Jaiku Sidelined, Moving On Twitter?).

Jyri Engstrom, a founder of Jaiku, tried to clarify the situation:

[from zengestrom.com: Signal (and noise) about Jaiku this week]

[…]

The reality is a bit more nuanced, but it is significantly more interesting in my opinion. First, the jaiku.com domain and the Jaiku user accounts (and their friend graph and their messages) continue to live on just as they have today. The biggest difference is that behind the scenes Jaiku is moving away from its original proprietary hosting model and on to App Engine.

Personally I love this for several reasons — it is a tremendous validation of the power of the App Engine platform, and another great learning opportunity for the engineers here to work with a very real service.

But the second, and perhaps even bigger news, is that all of the code used to power Jaiku on App Engine is going to be released under the Apache license. Combine these two changes — Jaiku on App Engine, and open source Jaiku — and you can start see the opportunity that emerges here.

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

Now that’s cool.

Maybe.

I still maintain that the real proof of all of that goodness would have been Google fielding a new improved Jaiku, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that they are up to something else, like trying to buy Twitter.

[via Techcrunch]