JaikuEngine will enable users at the individual, group and organisation levels to run their own micro blogging services through the Google App Engine. Although Google will stop developing the Jaiku code base, Google volunteers will continue to offer support. The JaikuEngine will also provide support to open standard authentication, which Twitter is already using. This will thus allow the creation of a freely available open source micro-blogging service.

JaikuEngine on Google Code

Since the time Google acquired Jaiku in October 2007, for an estimated $12 million, they have been see-sawing between shutting down the service almost immediately and then trying to restart it last August. Now the uncertainty is over and it is finally being handed over to the open source community.

Google surely hopes to be able to compete with the current darling of the social media spotlight, Twitter, by opening up its own micro-blogging service so that the open source community can mould it as they see fit.

Initial user and developer reactions have been mixed. Users seem to think that the loss of international SMS functionality would leave Jaiku with almost no desirable features to draw users away from Twitter. Developers, though, seem more upbeat about the opportunity to take micro-blogging to the next level.

From a business point of view, the acquisition of Twitter definitely looks like one of Google’s many recently admitted failures (think Dodgeball, Audio Ads, Google Video)

Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engestrom, believes “it’s time to break out and distribute micro-blogs… There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other.”

The audio ad service was launched in 2006 to enable the buying and selling of radio ads via Google AdWords. However, the search company now feel that in spite of investing a lot of resources, these services have not actually managed to create the kind of impact that was expected and it would be better to discontinue these services.

Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio will be phased out by the 31^st of May. Until then, publishers will be able to continue publishing their inventory. Google Radio Automation will be sold off to an interested party.

All is not quiet on the audio front, though. Google plans to concentrate on developing technology to deliver relevant ads for online streaming audio, where the audience numbers are increasing.

While it may be remembered that Google has also decided to shut down their Print Ads division only last month, they have stated that they will continue with their TV advertising initiatives as they can measure the audience response here and their advertisers can therefore judge ad effectiveness.

While some staff may be reassigned after the discontinuation of these services, it is expected that about 40 people will find themselves jobless as a result of this decision.

Even though Google executives maintain that they are closing the audio ads service due to failed expectations, if one looks at all their other recent cut-backs – print ads, followed closely by the closure of Jaiku, Dodgeball and Notebook – it looks suspiciously like a move to try and keep up the profit margin and tide over the financial meltdown by sticking to what they know best – search.

A few months ago, Google relocated some of their engineers from Phoenix-Arizona, to other places. Now another 70 employees from Austin-Texas, Trondheim in Norway and Lulea in Sweden are being asked to do the same. The reason behind this is to have fewer but better-coordinated engineering sites, which would help reduce overhead costs, while retaining the quality and efficiency of their services.

Another major step being taken by Google is to reduce the number of new recruits. Initially, they ended all the contracts they had with the outside sources that provided recruiting services to them. Now, however, they have gone a step further and decided to reduce the size of their recruiting department by as many as 100 people. The logic is, of course, that since they will be recruiting fewer people for quite some time, they will require less people to do so. However, the management is hopeful that most of these staff members will be reassigned to other appropriate jobs within the organisation itself.

While Google had laid off 300 employees of their subsidiary, DoubleClick, last year, the Times points out that this is the first time their own employees are being made redundant.

Google has also announced that they will discontinue some services that have not been doing too well or have been replaced by better apps. Amongst them are Jaiku, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, Google Notebook and uploads for Google Video.

Another indication of their cost cutting efforts is the fact that instead of the $1,000 bonus that employees get as a gift every year, this time they were just given a new T-Mobile G1 mobile phone.

Though these measures are relatively minor compared to the layoffs at Yahoo! and other tech companies in recent month, it is certainly bad news that the one company most experts thought would sail through the reecession unscathed is already trimming its workforce.

The worst is probably yet to come. Among other technology firms, Motorola has announced 4,000 job cuts, while there are unconfirmed rumors about the possibility of 15,000 layoffs at Microsoft.

Jaiku was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The Helsinki-based company released the service on the Web in July 2006. Google has just announced that they have acquired Jaiku. The financial terms of the acquisition and their intentions are unclear at present.
According to the founders of Jaiku, “Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.”

While Google’s acquisitions in the social media space have been erratic and mostly unsuccesful, this acquisition might not join the likes of Orkut or Dodgeball. Instead, if their acquisition of mobile social networking site Zingku is anything to go by, Jaiku’s mobile and SMS-posting technology was probably what Google was after.

Comparisons with Twitter have been favourable for Jaiku due to its mobile component and the blog-like posting method. Users can inform their friends about their activities through Twitter-style micro-blog posts as well as their exact current location via a cool mobile-enabled “presence” feature. However the number of phones supported is quite limited and posting via SMS requires a European number.