Twitter’s competitors are disappearing.
First, it was Pownce being acquired by Six Apart, and then closed down. Now, Google has decided to close Jaiku, which it acquired in 2007 to much acclaim.
The move comes as Google attempts to reduce expenses, and involves the closure of several other services such as Dodgeball, Google Notebook and Google Catalogu.
At one time, Jaiku was seen a strong rival to Twitter. In fact, there was much speculation about whether Google was going to buy Jaiku or Twitter. After the acquisition, Jaiku went into hiding before emerging last year.
Many thought Jaiku was going to become part of Google’s wireless strategy, and become a mobile micro-blogging service within Android. But this reality never materialized, and Jaiku gained no traction.
5 Comments
Can you really consider them rivals if neither is making money? Rivalry suggests that they're competing for something, but it definitely isn't revenue. Users? Maybe, but people can belong to both.
Fair point. I would suggest they are rivals for attention/users. At some point, the idea is Twitter will be able to monetize its popularity. At least, in theory!
Well if that's the measurement, then they're both losing to porn!
From what I've heard, they're not closing Jaiku, but rather finishing what they were doing and releasing it as Open Source. I think they were still going to host it on the App Engine (like Docs, Mail, etc) but they're just not committing manpower to its development anymore. It's a bit deceptive, but it seems like it's still going to be running.
To get the facts straight I would start with two links (that probably will put me in your spam filter):
http://www.jaiku.com/blog/2009/01/15/were-going-o…
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/01/c…
Google/Jaiku will release Jaiku as open source after it´s been ported to App engine. As I see it this is good for the microblogging community. I think that Google will use the jaiku tech and people to put the efforts in the open stack (Jyri has written about it in his blog) and instead of nailing us to a few propriety solutions you will be able to subscribe to different activity streams directly from people/companies sites. Think Google Friend Connect as the first step and with other new solutions and open social, Google/Jaiku still will have traction in the activity stream market but not as Jaiku.com even though I think it will live for quite some time.