Earlier this week Ernst-Jan virtually deadpooled Jaiku in this post titled “Finnish geeks say goodbye to their beloved Jaiku” On the Arctic Startup blog Ville Vesterinen reported that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community is abandoning Jaiku for Twitter because the feeds weren’t coming through and the SMS service had been disabled at Jaiku. All signs that Jaiku was dying.
The founder of Jaiku, Jyri Engeström, wasn’t talking either.
Now Jyri has spoken up (50 minutes ago) and gives us some details on what is happening at Google. It turns out Jaiku is not being killed at all but rather ported to Google App Engine.
Because Jyri is now treating Jaiku as a “20% project, meaning it has been getting about one day a week of my time” the development is taking longer than expected. In the mean time Jyri is spending his time mainly on the Social Graph API together with Brad Fitzpatrick.
Jyri assures us that Jaiku is still alive and kicking and we will see exciting new stuff in the future: “you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!’s in store.”
That is great, but when you realize how much time it takes to grow a start-up into a successful company, and then read that the whole project is getting no more than 20% time, I can’t help but worry.
Jaiku had some of the best minds on the Internet working for them. Makes sense that Google acquired them for that reason, and – unfortunately for us Jaiku fans – that reason alone.
I still feel the average level of discussion and, dare I say, IQ at Jaiku exceeds that found on Twitter. But with only a small core of people left and those who are increasingly turning to crossposting, I too don’t feel the urge anymore to come back to a service that I once thought could become one of the most influential on the web. The feeds, the mobile app, the UI, all so elegant and clever, it makes me sad so little is done with it. And we’re seeing it starve as a 20% project, without management or marketing, it’s as if Mozart retired at 8 years old.
I would feel sadder if Flickr would close down or probably last.fm but the decline of Jaiku is probably my biggest web service disappointment to date.
Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is a lot more than I expected for when I found a link on Delicious telling that the info here is quite decent. Thanks.