Google Jaiku Open Sourced To Combat Twitter
19th March 2009
For almost a year now, Google has been in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. The process is now complete, and the new JaikuEngine has been launched on Google Code, as an open source project that they hope will turn into a Twitter competitor.
JaikuEngine will enable users at the individual, group and organisation levels to run their own micro blogging services through the Google App Engine. Although Google will stop developing the Jaiku code base, Google volunteers will continue to offer support. The JaikuEngine will also provide support to open standard authentication, which Twitter is already using. This will thus allow the creation of a freely available open source micro-blogging service.
Since the time Google acquired Jaiku in October 2007, for an estimated $12 million, they have been see-sawing between shutting down the service almost immediately and then trying to restart it last August. Now the uncertainty is over and it is finally being handed over to the open source community.
Google surely hopes to be able to compete with the current darling of the social media spotlight, Twitter, by opening up its own micro-blogging service so that the open source community can mould it as they see fit.
Initial user and developer reactions have been mixed. Users seem to think that the loss of international SMS functionality would leave Jaiku with almost no desirable features to draw users away from Twitter. Developers, though, seem more upbeat about the opportunity to take micro-blogging to the next level.
From a business point of view, the acquisition of Twitter definitely looks like one of Google’s many recently admitted failures (think Dodgeball, Audio Ads, Google Video)
Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engestrom, believes “it’s time to break out and distribute micro-blogs… There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other.”
Tags: google, jaiku, mobile, social media, social-news, twitter
6 Responses to “Google Jaiku Open Sourced To Combat Twitter”
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Discussion on social networks & blogs
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Is Google About To Acquire Twitter? | AccuraCast Search Daily News : 3 April 2009 at 3:11 pm
[...] The possibility of a potential acquisition is exciting, but most Twitter users might not be thrilled about Google acquiring the service, especially given Google’s recent spate of failures with services such as Dodgeball and Jaiku. [...]
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No final, tudo termina em busca (atualizado) « Juliannepaulen’s Blog : 8 April 2009 at 12:57 pm
[...] diferente do Twitter, é em código aberto desde o mês passado. O Jaiku é visto pelo mercado como uma forma da Google frear o crescimento do [...]
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Jaiku is really good software, now that google is involved i can see only good news,
tho i wish google would put for effort into the mobile side of things
tho i wish google would put for effort into the mobile side of things
Eu só tenho uma opinião formada sobre isso: o Google quer dominar o mundo, rs.
A verdade é que, desde que eu li sobre o projeto Clean Energy 2030, onde o Goggle pretende investir U$S 4,4 trilhões em uma tentativa de salvar o mundo, reduzindo a poluição do planeta até 2030 (ou algo assim), eu não tenho mais tanta certeza sobre quais são os planos reais do Google e o seu empreendedorismo imprevisível.
É uma empresa muito a frente do seu tempo. Complicado dizer se a compra do Twitter está somente relacionado ao avanço do sistema de busca. Com certeza os planos dos caras com o microblogging são muito maiores.
@Leandro Macedo
Pois é, ainda é muito cedo para saber. Tem que esperar a “poeira baixar um pouco”.