Google 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.
I received several phone calls yesterday where I was asked about what is happening at Nokia and whether they are buying the Finnish SMS based social intention broadcasting application Zipiko.
The whole thing started when the Zipiko gang shared a taxi from the Nokia House located in Espoo, Finland with Prashant Agarwal, The director of Product Strategy at Fjord. Prashant Jaikued about it where it was picked up by the Jaiku co-founder Petteri Koponen who proposed that Nokia is about to acquire the small company.
This was enough to start a chain reaction in the Finnish social media and got it really boiling which 
eventually reached US and at that point it had already crossed over from Jaiku to Twitter. Co-incidentally the Zipiko servers where down just at the time that US was waking up and checking their Twitter feeds for the morning. All this would imply that Zipiko.com had received enough traffic, ignited by the news from the taxi ride, that their servers couldn’t handle it anymore .
Just a week earlier I had been watching Zipiko lead developer’s presentation on Google App Engine that they are using. Knowing that they use the App Engine lets me figure out exactly the amount of traffic that the service received to go down. Google App Engine manages up to 5 million views per month before letting the service go down. Now, that would be a rather remarkable amount of traffic ignited globally by just Jaiku and Twitter messages.
This makes would make a very interesting story if the protagonist herself, the Zipipop* CEO Helene Auramo, wouldn’t have admitted to me that the juicy rumor was just that, a rumor. Also their service was down from some unrelated reason. So it seems that Nokia is not yet going after this Finnish startup.
But the question remains: What did Zipiko do in the Nokia house in the first place?
*Zipiko is an app made by Zipipop and has part of the company working exclusively on it.
Many websites have reported that Jaiku is now being hosted on Google servers. I had to test it for myself and see what a traceroute would return – look for yourself.
Jaiku has been down all weekend with a notice: “Folks, we’re offline for the weekend for server maintenance. Now’s a good time to talk to someone you love.” Recently we also wrote about the web 2.0 crash that occured to Finnish startups using Nebula’s services and back then Jaiku was one of those services.
Mashable is guessing that the final move to Google App Engine is on the way, but to be honest – there’s no proof. We’ve written about the move a few times, but it hasn’t happened yet. Another interesting question to ask is that how many people have left Jaiku for twitter as this is the second long outage that has occured in a very short time period?
Jaiku has a scheduled downtime today from 17.00-05.00 UTC (didn’t see a notice on it anywhere before it though). The downtime being 12 hours is a lot longer than their previous maintenance breaks so could this be the final push for Jaiku to be moved on to the Google App Engine that we wrote about way back?
Looking forwards to it.
Update 25.7.: Seems like this was a regular maintenance break to take care of the database and get the API back online. More updates on the break at Jaiku channel.
Yesterday at a lecture in the Helsinki University Teemu Kurppa, one of the Jaiku founders, told people that currently Jaiku is being developed on the 20% free time Googlers have for their own projects. We reported that Jaiku will be one of the first applications to be running on Google App Engine and this port will be done on “normal” working hours.
Vierityspalkki wrote about this first in Finland and soon the press coverage followed. It’s nice to see that blogs too generate discussion.
Therefore it’s clear that buying Jaiku for Google at this moment was more about recruiting the team rather than develop the product. We’ve also seen this in Jaiku’s development (or lack there of) in the recent months.
Here’s a video of Teemu Kurppa, being interviewed – he’s advice is skip the summer job, code all summer. :)
Last week we were wondering what was happening to Jaiku as Petteri posted something that caught our eye. It seemed that he got the week’s mixed up as last night Google announced in Google Campfire that Jaiku will be one of the first services to be running on the new Google App Engine. Let’s hope this will shorten the somewhat lengthy development cycles we’ve seen since Google acquired Jaiku last year.
Google App Engine, according to TechCrunch (who’s Michael Arrington crashed the Google Campfire event with Robert Scoble), is an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services. According to Arrington the service is somewhat less flexible than Amazon’s S3 as it requires developers to lay the whole development stack on the Google servers where as in Amazon’s case you can pick and mix.
The Camp Fire website states that all users of Google App Engine get free quota of 500MB in persistent storage, and 5M monthly pageviews. In other words, developers are able to scale to a few million users without “infrastructure headaches”.
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