Jaiku

» see jaiku.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

jaiku launched in helsinki in february 2006, a month before twitter. it was built by jyri engestrom and petteri koponen as a microblogging service with two extras: presence updates that showed where you were and what you were doing, and lifestream feeds that pulled in your flickr photos and last.fm tracks. on a nokia phone it was better than twitter. nokia was finnish, jaiku was finnish, the integration felt natural.

google bought jaiku on october 9, 2007 for an undisclosed price. the announcement said all the right things about scaling the service and bringing it to more users. then nothing happened. jaiku stopped getting feature updates almost immediately. google moved most of the engineers to other projects. invites stopped going out. by 2009 the company open-sourced the codebase under jaikuengine and announced they were ending active development.

twitter spent those four years building the network effects jaiku used to have. by 2010 there was no question who had won. on october 14, 2011 google announced jaiku would be shut down on january 15, 2012. the shutdown notice was bundled with a list of other google products being killed that quarter, the way google had started doing those announcements.

i never used jaiku. by 2007 i was on twitter, where the network already lived in turkey. jaiku was a small european tech crowd's microblog, with most of its critical mass inside the helsinki and bay area engineer circles. it never had a turkish presence. i read about the shutdown when it happened and thought of it as one of the cleaner cases of an acquisition where google bought a thing they did not actually want to build.

~ the chronicle ~

~ killed by ~

google. specifically the four years between the october 2007 acquisition and the october 2011 shutdown announcement, during which jaiku received no meaningful updates while twitter shipped continuously. the shutdown itself was a formality.

~ what jaiku had ~

features twitter did not have for years. presence indicators and threaded comments on each post. friendfeed shipped some of the same patterns later. twitter eventually got threading in 2017. jaiku had it in 2006. the lifestream concept, which aggregated your activity from flickr and last.fm into your jaiku timeline, is also more or less what facebook's news feed became a few years later, except jaiku was doing it across third-party services.

~ the lesson ~

shipping first does not win. distribution wins. twitter was inside the san francisco tech press from day one, while jaiku was a finnish startup with mostly european users. when twitter started getting written about every week in techcrunch, jaiku could not catch the same wave. then google bought them and stopped working on the product. by then it was already too late.

~ what came after the founders ~

jyri engestrom went on to advise startups, run a vc fund called yes vc, and become a recurring voice in the european tech scene. petteri koponen co-founded lifeline ventures, one of the bigger early-stage funds in helsinki. the jaikuengine open-source project survived for a few years on app engine before quietly aging out. the actual jaiku.com domain still resolves to a placeholder. nothing else of the original product remains.

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