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.

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”.

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.

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.