Alexia Golez

And lo, how bad news is broke for Jaiku fans this morning. Google is doing a Dodgeball on Jaiku this morning, effectively killing it by discontinuing official support for the service and licensing the codebase under the open source Apache license. The service will be supported by volunteer Googlers. Yes, the code will be open for people to play with, but Jaiku is dead.

When Google acquired Jaiku and moved it to its App Engine there was a spark of hope for the service. Perhaps it would be the baked-in backbone of Google’s mobile social network moves on Android? We waited for Godot.

The service was walking dead a year ago, so Google’s decision amounts to merely the pulling the plug. But when you look at stats on the service, it’s easy to see why the axe fell.

Look at the AJ’s stats:

• On active users: Jaiku – 5,888,  Identica – 7,117, Twitter – 2,846,221
• On messages sent in a day:  Jaiku – 4,552.22, Identica – 10,261.96, Twitter -  approx 2,000,000

When the teething pains of Twitter got so bad, we jumped to Jaiku. Like Conor puts it, it’s not about the software, it’s about the people. Engineering can only go so far and Jaiku’s failure to capitalise on its early promise is another reminder of that.