Disabling SMS and re-opening m.jaiku.com

Dear Jaikuers, we'll be disabling our U.S. SMS service on June 30th. The usage doesn't justify the cost, so we're discontinuing the third-party relationship that Jaiku has been using to deliver SMS in the U.S. (international SMS was already shut down earlier this spring).

Meanwhile, thanks to @lemonad and the folks on #jaikuengine, the mobile site at m.jaiku.com is up and running again. Point your browser there if you're accessing the site from your mobile device. Android users can activate the Jaiku IM bot to receive push notifications on the go.

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!

Scheduled Downtime, 8:30am PST

We’re doing a little regular database maintenance tomorrow morning and will be down for a few hours while we speed up the site. See you again after the break :)

We’re going open source

Today on the Google Code blog, we announced some upcoming changes to Jaiku and other services. Here’s the part about Jaiku:

“As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While 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.

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.“