It has been officially announced that google shall ‘no longer’ actively develop jaiku. Instead they’re moving the product onto the Google Apps Engine and releasing it under open source licence. I say ‘no longer’, because I really consider this no news at all. Refer to the first jaiku post for reasons why so.

The doom and gloom dominated Jaiku today, a lot of pots claiming that google is shutting the service down. Which is not in fact true, Jaiku will continue to operate. How will it operate is an entirely different matter – but if the future hasn’t looked bright it’s certainly not due to today’s announcement. It’s due to the fact that google drained Jaiku of talented people who came up with the idea in the first place. That’s what it comes down to.

The key part of the announcement reads: we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.

Well. I’m all for open sourcing Jaiku as I know it could serve as a good creative tool for internal communications. I’ve seen sough projects come out of Jaiku-based meeting of collaborators to be certain. Ask Linux Outlaws if in doubt. Whether the central hub for all users that is jaiku.com will survive this is a bit more worrisome. No mentioning of who will be responsible for maintaining the service didn’t do google’s announcement any good. True that now no one can hold them to what they had promised, because they haven’t promised anything. But this audience needs a bit more serious treatment.

My main argument with laconi.ca, the open source microblogging platform, was that for development open-sourcing is not enough – you have to a community that will actually do the development (and not only talk about how happy they are that they could do it, had they had time) or ability to mobilise people into joining such community. In this sense Jaiku has an upper hand, as the community (I wrote about it) is pretty special. But I doubt it will be the type of community to actually sit down to the honest tool of coding  – after all it works and we all have day jobs. Still bringing Jaiku open source at least opens the possibility, which was not there before.

Community-wise moving Jaiku’s team to the States while most of the users – I estimate – are still European, might have been a mistake, notably a mistake that Google can afford. The reason why Twitter ever took off was that it was Sillicon Valley based, made by people who knew people etc. I would often hear that it might not be a grate communication tool but the people you want to see your blog/enterprise/pr are on twitter – with some luck you can show off your work to some one who either is or at appears to be somewhat powerful. That is great; we can write a blog post, inform twitter about it and “relax in Honolulu based on that“. Twitter will also always be more popular (in terms of numbers) than Jaiku because it requires less involvement and less time. Demographics that has the time and energy and is willing to actively take part in actual discussion is always going to be smaller than demographic who can do it half arsed (post and leave it). Any one who expected Jaiku to become some sort of massively used solution was indeed wrong and it’s bound to get disappointed.

I still think Jaiku community is about something else. These are creative people who do engage in discussion. There might not be a lot of them, but they will be much more determined to sustain their tools of communication. These people matter not in terms of their number but in terms of their creative potential – which, I know, is not the way big companies tend to think, especially in recent times.

But we can kick off hell like no one else.

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