Developers: The Future of Micro-Blogging is in Your Hands
We knew it was coming; we just didn't know when. Google yesterday announced that it is releasing its Jaiku code under the open source Apache license 2.0 after finalizing the move of the micro-blogging service to Google App Engine last week.
As we mentioned two months ago, Google will no longer be developing the Jaiku codebase, but Google volunteers will be available to offer support.
When Google acquired the Twitter-like service in 2007, many of us had high hopes for Jaiku's future until Google almost immediately closed it to the public offering little explanation. Last August, we wondered whether we were watching Jaiku's rebirth when it returned with unlimited invites, and now finally, we can stop the speculation as JaikuEngine is handed over to the open source community.
According to a post on the Jaikido blog last week, "JaikuEngine differs from Jaiku in a few key ways. Although core features like the website, SMS (in the US only) and IM bot still work, feed fetching and international SMS are no longer available."
Google points out that the problem with feed fetching is not specific to Jaiku and all real-time communication services face challenges maintaining freshness when using poll-based systems. As for the international SMS scaling issues, Google explains that the issues were more financial than technical and suggests using IM on "capable mobile devices."
The new JaikuEngine will also include support for OAuth, the open standard authentication protocol that Twitter recently began experimenting with in an effort to give users more control and confidence in their interactions with third-party applications.
It will be interesting to see what the next few months bring.
Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now a product manager at Google, said that he agrees with Dave Winer that it's time to break out of Twitter. "There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other. Jaiku doesn't do that yet, but now there's a decent chance that it soon will," he wrote on his blog today.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we are great fans of Twitter. And certainly, it holds the market share when it comes to micro-blogging services. But, we'd love to know what you think. Will JaikuEngine inspire developers enough to give Twitter a run for its money or will the service again slowly wither away? Let us know in the comments.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I agree. That's why I've gravitated to services like Laconi.ca (which powers Identi.ca)... it's only smart, and with Twitter going more and more mainstream, there are plenty of opportunities for competing services.
Interesting article from Read Write Web about the future of Mirco-Blogging. Of special interest to those who wonder if Twitters dominance will prevail in years to come.
I'm all for twitter competitors, I think it's good. But we're sort of spinning our wheels by creating multiple networks that look and act exactly like twitter with no variation.
As an example Laconi.ca is an open source microblogging application, but what does it offer that twitter does not?
I hope the answer to your last question is yes, otherwise we're just building twitter clone on top of twitter clone.
Question, how does an open source solution like laconi.ca and this new JaikuEngine stack up? I'd love to see a super-geeky rundown on that.
Miss the fact that Jaiku no longer fetches feeds. I fetched feeds from my blog, Twitter, Flickr and elsewhere and had the badge on my home page. It acted like a "What's New". It is totally redundant now. Need to search for an alternative.
I never came across micro blogging before but this is really interesting one I will bookmark this on my browser
It's certain that there won't be one house (Twitter), if only because there are me-too's and thus social value in bridging services in the search for larger patterns.
So the frontier is federation. Instead of calling a horse race between a couple of brands, ask how do the actual social networks interact across servers.
What patterns will emerge when a thousand Jaiku's interconnect? Will independent domains be a useful or necessary level of organization, helping to coordinate group interaction?
==
Your article reminded me of a debate that took place between me and some friends few days ago.
I was a fan to Jaiku and I used to like it even more than Twitter. May be because it is written with Python :)
But the recent moves from Google made me believe that Jaiku is dying. And that made me ask myself, who do Twitter competitors die like that? It started with Pownce and then Jaiku.
IMHO, Jaiku was not just a Twitter clone, there were a bit advanced than Twitter. They had the Feeds fetching thing, and Conversations. So what is their problem then? Why do people prefer Twitter more than Jaiku?
I guess it is mainly a marketing thing. Twitter is older and all the Web2.0 and Tech celebrities use it, and for most of us Twitter is just the synonym of Micro Blogging.
If I were in Google's shoes I would have paid some effort to market Jaiku a bit more. They already *own* the Internet and they can do anything. They were able to integrate it with their GTalk for example, they were able to add it into their Tool Bars, Blogger, Gmail, you name it.
One more thing, it is well known that most of Twitter's traffic comes from its API's and not its Web Interface. And Jaiku had an open API too, but it was somehow abandoned and buried under the ground, its documentations wasn't that clear, they didn't have active community for it.
I've just realized that I am talking about Jaiku in past tense as if it is already dead. I do not know if it is really dead or not, but I hope that new JaikuEngine and the guys who are going to participate in its development will bring Jaiku back to life.
Please visit http://www.freegovtjobs.com for access to more than 1,000 vacant government jobs located across the United States.
@jyoseph, have you tested YouAre.com?
Last Facebook redesign has showed us that microblogging is for everyone and one of the aims is to make it evolve as a solution to handle your personal and professional identity.
That has been one of the main targets when we started YouAre development.
Decentralization of micro-blogging services - that's a good idea! But what could make people move from Twitter to a Jaiku/Laconica based website? There's nothing Twitter doesn't have, isn't it?
But what open source software is better for starting an own platform? Jaiku or Laconica?
Loved ReadWriteWeb, but was trying to find a "Follow RWW on Twitter" icon and did not find one, my humble suggestion - Add one :)
But don't worry, my twitter-sense told me to point my browser to http://twitter.com/readwriteweb and found RWW. Followed!
Most important move forward for users will be when free-software based services such as Jaiku and Identi.ca have a way to interoperate, maybe through the Open Microblogging specification - or any other way that is open to all comers.
Jaiku and Identi.ca are outsiders who both will profit from interoperability to reach critical mass against the large established players. I believe that Google should lend them a helping hand : the most difficult step is the first one, when the first two players find a way to work together. Once that is done, others can join with less effort and a world of open microblogging will bloom - to the indirect benefit of Google who will see his competitors threatened.
Open source Jaiku is great news : having more than one credible project to carry the open microblogging torch is a significant potential gain for users.
i do agree, also microblogging protocols should start to talk to each other before it's too late and we'll have platforms that cross-reference data (like multi IM managers).
I think it's rather evident that it's always good news when something goes open source. Especially so when something good goes OS. Haven't followed up if the S60 (Symbian) client has (yet) been open-sourced but I'd assume that it will, too. That was really the thing that set Jaiku apart from its competitors (for me - phone contact integration, naming location based on cell towers, etc).
It should be clear to see that breaking free from a monopolistic closed source is _always_ good. Just think back about all examples we've seen: Windows vs. Linux, MS Office vs. Open Office etc, Lotus Notes & MS Outlook vs. Thunderbird etc, IE vs. FF, and so on.
Borrowing from the old saying: We need to remember and understand our history to not do stupid things in the future.