Google have announced they will officially be closing or ceasing development on a number of their (relatively) popular products including; Google Video Uploads, Google Notebook, Dodgeball and Google Catalog Search.
With Jaiku, Google have decided to halt development but release what they are calling the open source “Jaiku Engine” project on Google code under the Apache License. In a post about the decision, vice president of Engineery Vic Gundotra says:
“we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.”
Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand has highlighted the official posts:
- Turning Down Uploads at Google Video
- Farewell, Google Catalog Search
- Stopping development on Google Notebook
- Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor
Whether you use these services or not, this should come as a surprise mainly due to the sheer number of services as well as the fact that services such as; Google Notebook and Jaiku still have loyal users. Jaiku, acquired in 2007, has seen little improvement and Google Notebook has had few improvements in recent months.
Is this the end of Jaiku or is the beginning? Netscape didn’t go anywhere until they open sourced the code and a small group of developers turned it into Firefox. Could the same happen to Jaiku now?
I’m glad at least there is now a clear situation for Jaiku. It missed a window of opportunity that Twitter gladly jumped through, but like the Firefox example of Boris maybe Jaiku will this way be the foundation for something more significant in the long run.
Besides the server code I also hope the mobile client (Symbian) will be open sourced, that was truly one of the most visionary mobile apps to date and would be great to be revived, e.g. by the Android community.