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.

We’ve been speculating about Jaiku moving the Google App Engine and on Wednesday when Jaiku came back up after a period of down time many believed the move had happened. Yet, Jyri clarified that this is not the case yet and the actual move is still ahead.

During the weekend and early this week when Jaiku was down, it was only moved as far as to the Google data center. Nevertheless, as it came back up it was already lighting fast compared to what it had been before and equally important the invitations opened up and are now unlimited.

And there’s more in the cards. For example, the new Jaiku API will support OAuth, which in itself is already fantastic. If the service can also handle an ever increasing user traffic without slowing down significantly or crashing it will be interesting to see whether it can still make itself a serious competitor for Twitter. We certainly hope so.

Edit: If you’d like to have an invite, ask for one in the comments (and do leave your real e-mail in the field provided) - we’re more than happy to spread the good around.

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. :)