Goodbye Jaiku? Nope, says Engestrom
p2pnet news view Products | P2P:- Google has just bought dodgeball.com, set up by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert who described it as a social networking site built specifically for mobile phones, p2pnet reported in 2005.
Then, a couple of years later, “The guys at Dodgeball have had a gut-full of Google,” we posted, going on,quoting them as stating:
“We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really ‘got’ what we were doing – that is until we met Google,” said founders Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert said almost exactly a year ago.
“They looked at us in a ‘You’re two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let’s see what you can do with it’ type of way, they said at the time.
But they found out all that glitters ain’t necessarily gold so, “Alex and I quit Google on Friday,” they said in a Flickr post.
They went on »»»
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Then this month, “Google has long believed that thoughtful iteration is the best way to build useful products for our users,” the company blogged, going on »»»
As part of that process, we are always looking for ways to better focus our teams on the products that can have the most impact.
As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, 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.
With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.
Some of you may also be familiar with Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking service that lets you share your location with friends via text message. We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available. We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly.
Finally, in the spirit of onward and upward, we have decided to shut down the Mashup Editor, currently in limited private beta, in favor of the more powerful App Engine infrastructure. Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months, and we hope you will join our team in making the exciting transition to App Engine.
And Twitter-like Jaiku really is ‘changing,’ the euphemism Google uses in its ‘Goodbye’ headline, says Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engestrom, continuing »»»
The reality is a bit more nuanced, but it is significantly more interesting in my opinion. First, the jaiku.comApp Engine. domain and the Jaiku user accounts (and their friend graph and their messages) continue to live on just as they have today. The biggest difference is that behind the scenes Jaiku is moving away from its original proprietary hosting model and on to
Personally I love this for several reasons — it is a tremendous validation of the power of the App Engine platform, and another great learning opportunity for the engineers here to work with a very real service.
But the second, and perhaps even bigger news, is that all of the code used to power Jaiku on App Engine is going to be released under the Apache license. Combine these two changes — Jaiku on App Engine, and open source Jaiku — and you can start see the opportunity that emerges here.
Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.
Now that’s cool.
Will Google have a team of 20 working on Jaiku? No, and we’re not going to sugar coat it, which is exactly why we posted such an honest an open letter about the future of the product. Are there many of us who passionately care about Jaiku and about the possibilities of microblogging? Absolutely. And we want you to participate.
Stay tuned.
p2pnet – Google buys dodgeball.com, May 12, 2005
until we met Google – Google buys dodgeball.com, May 12, 2006
Flickr – me + alex quit google. (dodgeball forever!!!!), April 15, 2007
blogged – Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor, January 14, 2009
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