Jaiku To Live On: Open Sourced on Google App Engine

Despite earlier reports that the Google owned microblogging platform Jaiku was to completely close, a new post from Google confirms that the service will live on, sort of.

From the post, Jaiku will be ported to the Google App Engine then open sourced, allowing anyone to grab the code and use it for their own service.

Google isn’t clear though on the existing service: a port to Google Apps may disrupt the current service, and Google doesn’t specifically say that existing users will continue to be supported. Instead they say that “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,” what ever that means.

Here’s the money quote from the post

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.

Either way, they still killed one of the most promising microblogging platforms. For more on the Google Massacre, read here.