Jaiku – Morphing not Dying? Bah! Died a long time ago
So two posts caught my eye in the past hour. On TechCrunch we see Jaiku Founder: “We’re Not Dying, We’re Morphing”. Stowe Boyd posted Jyri Engestrom on Jaiku’s Future.
Both point to Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom’s post Signal (and noise) about Jaiku this week. Jyri had this to say:
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.
I’d love to be kind and charitable, but WTF are you smokin’ Jyri?
Jaiku had potential. Jaiku had the power to squash Twitter quite handily and easily. But the team got so focused on being acquired that the service went stale. Flat and stale. Zero effervesence. And then they got acquired and things got worse. But the paychecks were nice.
In Internet development time, nothing happened at all. Ever. Zero progress. Jaiku died of old age, apathy and general disinterest long before Google had the mercy to pull the plug. It’s pretty common knowledge that what Google wanted was the talent behind Jaiku, which is also some talent from the Nokia past in many ways. Google got what they paid for. They got the talent.
Users got left behind. Jaiku supporters and users got screwed and left in the dust. The message to them? “Thanks for the big paychecks you helped us get from Google. Your community is stuck in a time warp.” They dynamic and magical Jaiku community is gone. The lifestreaming dream that many users saw ahead dried up.
And now, Jaiku’s an open source project where you can roll your own microblogging service and deploy it for a dozen of your buddies and Jyri thinks this is a good thing. And yes, it could have been a great thing a year ago. Could have. Today, it’s yawner. There’s no flogging life back into that horse. It’s dead Jyri. You watched it die, and spitting out feathers like “Now that’s cool.” don’t make it cool. They don’t make it viable.
They just make it more deadpool fodder. Own it and don’t dance around reality. There’s no breathing life back into the corpse that was Jaiku.
Technorati Tags: Jaiku. Google, Jyri Engestrom
on January 18th, 2009 at 1:02 am
Ken, I completely disagree.
Some of the very people who initially wrote Jaiku always believed in microblogging as a decentralized system. Different groups of people can and will have good reason to run their own instance, and favour one service over another. But will be able to communicate across services (in a lowest common denominator fashion, likely to be set by the Twitter feature set today).
Jaiku.com as a brand, as a direct competitor to Twitter? Yep, dead.
Jaiku-as-code, and potentially ushering in lots of folks running their own microblogging site? Very much alive, much like lots of people running their own blogs rather than one of the large hosted services.
on January 18th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Thanks Boris. I think you refine and reinforce my point in many ways.
The people who wrote Jaiku created something powerful and awesome. That power was never realized. Not even close. And while the code will live on, they ceded leadership in thinking to FriendFeed in so many ways. Jaiku stagnated, which in Internet terms is died. I agree the code will live on. But a code snip in a library is only as powerful as the community behind it.
You noted jaiku.com as a brand is dead. Beyond that, as a community it’s disenfranchised…fragemented…shattered. The Jaiku communoty was always the power, not the code. That isn’t just me saying that. The real power lies in the community, the supporters and the people. Not in the code.
I have no doubt the code will live on and appear in snips buried inside many other things. It may rise again with a new life, but it won’t be Jaiku ever again.
And the reality they even Jyri lost the message and power of lifestreaming to refer to it as microblogging adds merit to that argument.
Personally, I don’t expect to see the word microblogging live through 2009. It’s a dead mindset and a terribly limiting way to think about things. And I can’t envision people running a microblogging site analagous to blogging in any way. I think that’s apples and oranges in far too many respects.
I agree with you that the code will live on. No doubt. Some of my freeware code from the 80s still lives here and there. But the magic is gone and the light went out. I don’t believe that’s recoverable.
on January 18th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Boris,
Thanks for commenting on our post. I’d like to comment because something you said, something some of the jaiku people have said bothers me a little.
You say: Jaiku-as-code, and potentially ushering in lots of folks running their own microblogging site? Very much alive, much like lots of people running their own blogs rather than one of the large hosted services.
That’s all fine and good, but it boils down to semantics. The very service that we all joined to, that was a community, has become an unsupported non-community.
The truth is, there has been a ton of other communities and will continue to be based on the various api’s that exist for other micro-blogging services. That jaiku is now open for people to use their code changes nothing and doesn’t make stronger the ccommunity that once existed on jaiku. It simply means everyone will move on and what once was jaiku is no more.
In other words it’s dead. Semantics aside, jaiku was a fantastic community once upon a time. But just like all fairytales, it came to “The End”.
on January 18th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Hmmm…this takes more thinking. I argued that Twitter was no innovation, that it was “just people”, almost 2 years ago.
And got lambasted…folks saying “of course it’s the people, stupid!”.
Today, I read a post asking for the features that the “Code” of Jaiku already has — plugging in automated tweets, and letting followers choose which to hear, and which to mute.
If the Twitter community (or rather, some of the identities on it) move their “main house” to one of these other islands of code, but which can transparently communicate back and forth between these communities, what then? Will Twitter grow or shrink? Will microblogging as a whole grow or shrink? Will more or less people use Jaiku code in some way?
Isn’t this a matter of better tools? That some will adopt, and some won’t.
The community of Jaiku died a long time ago. On this we can agree.
I guess I have more faith that interesting people will continue to experiment with tools. And I will be actively seeking and making invitations between code and communities.
on January 20th, 2009 at 12:41 am
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