jaiku invites

There have been some reports going around that Jaiku is now just a 20% time project at Google. Arctic Startup reports that @teemu has said  “currently Jaiku is being developed on the 20% free time Googlers have for their own projects.” He also goes on to talk about the port to Google App Engine and says that “this port will be done on “normal” working hours.”

After a little further digging into it I discovered this thread on Jaiku in Finnish which is talking about the talk that @teemu gave in a Helsinki University. The basic gist of it is some of the students talking about what @teemu had said. He then comes on to clear a few things up (sorry about the rough translation see the original here. Please correct me if it’s wrong.)

Let me correct some possible misunderstandings, Jaiku will continue its existence and Jaiku is being ported to the Google App Engine . Its porting will make the expansion of the user numbers possible in the future, so that joining without an invite will be possible. The Port is in part worked on full-time but we are also working in part on something new.

Andy @termie works full-time at the moment on the Jaiku port, I have smaller focus at the moment.

To me all this goes to lay further strength to the argument that Google mainly bought Jaiku for the developers and that we may see some sort of Jaiku-Android integration in the future. I wonder if we will see any of Jonathan Mulholland (@jonmul ) predictions coming true?

So just a quick update on what’s been happening here at JaikuInvites. Some of you might have noticed some down time recently and thanks to everyone who jaikued me letting me know. And the other one is the constant fluctuation of number of invites we have on Jaiku.

First Jaiku, the dev guys over there have been doing some bug fixes and it would seem the first fluctuation was caused by @termie uploaded some old invite code, which he fixed as soon as he found out. Now I can only suppose that this one is the same problem, I have asked @termie but haven’t heard anything back yet. You guys will be the first to know when I do though.

UPDATE: The invites are now fixed, thanks to @termie again. You should have all your invites back to what they were before now.

Second is uptime, two things happened in the last week or so that led to that and both of them revolved around JaikuInvites moving hosting.

The first issue was a silly one on my part where I had the domain set up with four name servers two were my own and two belonged to my old host. When I moved the site some of you were still going to the old site as you cached the 3rd and 4th nameservers when one and two went down and then when they came back up at the new location you still saw the old site location. Which was also throwing some nice errors at you, sorry about that. All fixed there now.

The second was outside my control, and it was that my new server went down. This caused the second bit of downtime and although the guys got it sorted out very quickly and efficiently, an unfortunate side effect was we lost a small amount of data.

As a result if you registered to share invites wed/thurs/friday last week, can you please do it again. Also if you requested an invite then and didn’t get it, then register again. I think all had been sent bar one or two as I was checking shortly before it went down so we should be okay but if you got a request about then try and make sure to fulfil it.

Also one or two of you have asked what will happen to us when Jaiku opens, well I hope to keep bringing all the latest Jaiku news here and until the opening we will keep helping you to share those invites. I might also have some new surprises for you too.

Woo hoo! So this this time is for real unlike my slightly prophetic April fools post, we now have confirmation that Jaiku will be reopening registrations. Jaiku is to moving to the newly launched Google App Engine and with that move we will see a much faster Jaiku and the long awaited reopening of registrations.

@jryi - “initially don’t expect new features - if all you notice is an increase in speed and reliability and re-opening of registrations, we’ve been successful :)”

From what I can see (via Mashable) you will need a Google account to use a Google App Engine application so hopefully this will also see the integration of Jaiku accounts with your Google accounts, although they seam to be have some initial teething problems with authentication. This is great news for Jaiku users and once they move is complete we hope to see lots of new features and integration with existing google services.

The official announcement was made over on the Jaikido blog and the announcement of the Google App Engine was broadcast live by @Scobleizer via Qik and live blogged by @techcrunch on the TechCrunch blog.

Google is expected to announce later today that Jaiku is to be the default phone book on all Android devices and that Jaiku will open to the public with the launch of the first Android handsets. The Jaiku API is also going to integrated into the latest release of the Android SDK, also today, to allow other applications to use the Jaiku platform.

I was speaking with jyri yesterday who said he could neither confirm nor deny it but he did confirm that they have been working very hard on some major developments and a big announcement will be made by Google and Jaiku today. Industry insiders have long expected this move since Google purchased Jaiku and many will be delighted to see it come.

This news comes on the same day that Ewan over on SMS Text News announces that Google have bought out the Vodafone group and could be making moves for Verizon.

Google strategy on mobile and the mobile web is really coming into effect and it won’t be long before they enjoy the same level of dominance as they do in other areas. One must wonder how long it will be before we see more Google applications becoming the default, I’m looking very much at Gmail here.

UPDATE: This was an Aprils fools day post, posted on the 1st of April 2008. Google did not announce that Jaiku would be the default phonebook on Android, however they did announce that it is to re-open. Google did not buy the Vodafone group. Also this blog is not run by Jaiku and it is run by me (@CiaranR) as so many of you have quoted this a blog run by Jaiku, Jaiku’s blog is here.