Google open sources poor man's Web2.0rhea

$12m Jaiku put out to pasture

By Cade Metz, 16th March 2009

Google has open sourced Jaiku under the Apache 2.0 license, just sixteen months after paying $12 million for the would-be Twitter rival.

The Mountain View Chocolate Factory announced its Web2.0rhea purchase in October 2007. But this January, as part of its new-found attention to belt-tightening, Google said it would soon cease work on Jaiku and bestow at least a portion on the code base to world+dog.

The company officially flipped the switch late last week. The source code is available on the Google Code Project under the name JaikuEngine.

"Developers, start your JaikuEngines," reads a post to the Jaikido blog. "As Google will no longer be actively developing jaiku.com, the future of Jaiku is in your hands."

Meanwhile, the service itself had been moved onto the Google App Engine, the development platform that sits on Mountain View's rather large cloud. Naturally, developers can also run their own JaikuEngine instances on Google's cloud.

Like Twitter, Jaiku is a way for bombarding people with an endless stream of solipsistic mini-messages. Some call it micro-blogging. Others call it micro-bogging.

As part of his "20 per cent time" - Google Oompa Loompas are encouraged to spend a portion of their day doing whatever they want - engineer Mika Raento has also open sourced the Jaiku Mobile client under dueling MIT and GPL licenses. Now that Jaiku has been moved to App Engine, the current version of the mobile client no longer connects to the live service. But Google says this issue will be remedied. ®

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