Google Dropped the Ball on Jaiku

This is a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”

What are the three hottest web 2.0 social services right now?  Judging by the latest buzz amongst early adopters, these services are Brightkite, FriendFeed and that perennial love/hate favorite, Twitter.  What’s interesting about each of these services is that Google is noticeably absent from the market. Or is it?

Brightkite is the latest in a string of “geo-social networks” that allows members to check in at real world places via SMS, notifying their Brightkite friends of their physical location - just perfect for those spur of the moment stalkings serendipitous meetings with your nearest and dearest. (You can read more about what Brightkite has to offer over at ReadWriteWeb.)

FriendFeed (for those living in the stone age or still pining for the days of Compuserve) is a ‘”social aggregator” start-up by a bunch of ex-Googlers that lets users aggregate the output of a large number of online services into a central point.  According to the FriendFeed FAQ, the goal of the service is to “make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information“.  While that sounds like a steaming pile of aspirational nothing to me, FriendFeed has been picked up enthusiastically by the early adopter crowd.  It can crawl websites for your publicly available information and it also supports a long list of sites with APIs such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Mixx and last.fm (here’s the full list ).  Part of the excitement - and controversy - around FriendFeed is that the service enables other FriendFeed users to leave comments on your items in FriendFeed itself, providing not just an aggregation of your content but an aggregation of comments on your content.

And as for Twitter… well, if you haven’t heard about Twitter by now you’re probably reading this page by accident anyway.

But What About Jaiku?

In October 2007 Google acquired Jaiku, the Finnish social network that was the brainchild of two ex-Nokia employees Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen . Jaiku first came to the attention of many when Leo Laporte announced on his blog in April 2007 he was moving over to Jaiku from Twitter due to confusion between Twitter and his TWiT podcast network.  The influx of new users was sufficient to actually crash the service (such is the power of the Leo effect).

Let’s check off what features Jaiku boasts:

1. A geo-aware mobile phone app that reads your location based on names reported by mobile phone towers

2. The ability to import information from a selection of website APIs as well as any RSS feed

3. 140 char SMS friendly micro-blog status updates

… not to mention a slick user interface and threaded comments.

However, following the acquisition by Google, the silence was deafening. The usually highly responsive dev team didn’t post nearly as often. The API went missing in action a number of times. The normally rock solid service often either crawled to a halt or regularly reported 503 gateway errors (a database problem).  The blog went quiet, although the developers raised their heads above the trenches in January of this year to proclaim “big things are coming” (‘We’ve joined Google. Now what?’).  In April it was announced that Jaiku was being ported to the Google App Engine, which goes someway to explaining the lack of development.  Unfortunately, the momentum was lost.  Users started to slip back to Twitter.  Developers just didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the API so there no was no widespread developer ecosystem like the one that sprung up around Twitter.

Stocktake time. Despite the fact that Jaiku has everything that the hottest 2.0 properties have, all tied up on one neat basket, Google has failed to get any mindshare at all amongst users and developers. Unless Google has some fiendishly cunning plan for world domination, it really looks like they’ve dropped the ball here.

Of course, Google does have some history doing the same thing before:  Dodgeball, anyone?

This has been a guest post by Shane Perris who blogs at Techwhimsy, “a place for considered ideas, current events in review and explorations of how to do things not just because you need to but just because you can.”