JaikuEngine is now open source!

Yesterday, we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.

So, developers, start your JaikuEngines. As Google will no longer be actively developing jaiku.com, the future of Jaiku is in your hands. Point your browser to the project and join the jaikuengine-discuss group to learn more and get started.

As a 20% project, Mika has open sourced the Jaiku Mobile client (dual-licensed MIT and GPLv2). Users of the client may have noted already that the current build will no longer connect to the server now that Jaiku is hosted on App Engine. We'll let you know when the new build is ready for download!

Jaiku is becoming JaikuEngine

Today is a special day: Jaiku is now being served from Google App Engine. That's the first step in Google making Jaiku freely available as a federated, open source microblogging platform. Although Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the platform will live on as JaikuEngine in the hands of the open source community.

JaikuEngine differs from Jaiku in a few key ways. Although core features like the website, SMS (in the US only) and IM bot still work, feed fetching and international SMS are no longer available.

The problem of maintaining freshness with a poll-based system is a challenge not just for Jaiku, but for all real-time communication services. We hope the open source community will implement a better solution.

International SMS also had scaling issues, but for financial rather than technical reasons. One potential solution is to use IM on capable mobile devices such as the G1. Developers can also build clients that take advantage of presence and other features of the new JaikuEngine API.

We'll be releasing the open source JaikuEngine code and sharing more information in the coming days. Stay tuned!

Jaiku is now served from App Engine

Jaiku is back up and running on Google App Engine now. We're still working through some issues with SMS and the IM bot, and expect them to be up and running soon. Also, stay tuned for information on the open source release of the Jaiku code base and our Symbian mobile client, coming soon!

Upcoming service break

We'll be taking Jaiku offline at 03:00 pm PST (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, March 11th, to migrate jaiku.com to Google App Engine. We expect about 24 hours of downtime. We know how important it is for you that Jaiku stays up and running, so we'll be doing everything we can to make the downtime as short as possible. We'll post an update here when we're back.

Thanks for your patience!