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!