Google Ceases Development of Jaiku, Open Sources Platform

    jaikuGoogle announced that they’re closing or ceasing development of variety of services, including Jaiku.

    As mentioned eariler, Jaiku has been in process of porting to Google App Engine and there have been some rumours of opening the Jaiku platform. Official release now states that Jaiku Engine will be open sourced under the Apache Licence, and supported by volunteer team of Googlers.

    This probably means that Google will not have any plans of integrating or bringing Jaiku to other platforms like Android. Jaiku will transform into a general microblogging platform and the open source efforts will help keeping Jaiku.com development alive. Other than that, this is a huge hit on the Jaiku.com community, brand and service. There are benefits of building platforms, but usually a more intense community is not one of them.

    Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now a Googler, stated in recent Jaiku discussion (1, 2) that current schedule for release is during this spring.

    It will be also intresting to see what kind of changes App Engine will need to run the full feature set of Jaiku.