Jaiku Invites, a Jaiku fan site, posts on what appears to be Jaiku's move from their own infrastructure to that of Google.  Here's the quote...

For those of you not familiar with trace routes the last few lines there show that the domain Jaiku.com is now on the google network. The IP address that it finishes at is also one belonging to several blocks used by GAE [Google App Engine]. Up until this, Jaiku.com had remained on the same Finnish server it was on when google bought it, trying to survive on just 1GB of RAM.

For those who aren't familiar with the name Jaiku was a microblogging service that competed with Twitter, Pownce, etc...  In October of 2007 they were acquired by Google and essentially shut down (existing users could still use it but they stopped taking any new signups). 

That was all we heard from Jaiku for a long, long time. 

I'll be honest, this post is less about Jaiku and more about Google's business strategy in general.  You see there are a few factors that are unique to Jaiku that make a very important point about how Google is being run internally.  Those are...

1.  Microblogging was an emerging business with a lot of attention when Google bought Jaiku. 

2.  Microblogging is not that hard a programming task.  Any modifications Google would have needed to make to Jaiku should have been fairly easy to do.

3.  Jaiku was already written in Python (the native language of Google App Engine).  The framework it was written in was not Google's preferred one (GAE uses Django, Jaiku uses Twisted) but the fact that it was already written in Python should have sped the process along a little.

4.  Jaiku had an urgent need for more resources.  As Jaiku invites puts it...

Jaiku.com had remained on the same Finnish server it was on when google bought it, trying to survive on just 1GB of RAM.

So all in all it was in Google's best interest to get Jaiku up and running as quickly as possible and the task couldn't have been much easier.  Yet it still took Google 11 months just to move it over to their servers. 

I think this proves that Google's propensity for burying the companies they acquire is not a technical problem (though I'm sure that contributes) but one of poor management.  Because this was about as easy a technical task as they could have gotten and they still fumbled the ball. 

Google is backing itself into a very uncomfortable corner right now.  They can't seem to grow organically yet they also can't seem capitalize on companies they acquire.  The problem is being hidden right now by their massive search revenues but once that stops impressing Wall Street people are going to start looking real hard at Google's (apparently flawed) business practices.  I'd hope for their sake that these problems are fixed by then.

Prologue

First, this is an automated post since I am on vacation, just so you know. 

That said, pardon my "posting three consecutive posts on a topic" thing.  The fact is I wanted to have an automated post so the blog wouldn't go dark for 5 days and this, which was originally part of the last post, got so long that it made sense to give it an entire post of its own. 

End Prologue

(I'm not sure that was actually a prologue since it has nothing to do with the actual post below, but anyway...)

One of the biggest ironies of the whole discussion of "Federated Servers" is that Twitter's nature does not lend itself to Federation.

Ask yourself, what do people like about twitter?  Generally its that they can communicate in real time but using a "broadcasting" model (as opposed to one-to-one like IM).  But one of the most important points there is that the communication has to be in real time.

Federated services such as smtp based e-mail are not in real time.  There are communication problems between servers, network errors, servers going down, and other various incidents that can often times prevent an e-mail from being delivered instantaneously.  As someone who runs an e-mail server I can tell you first hand that it isn't abnormal for an e-mail to be several hours late. 

But if that same thing happened to a Twitter like service it would absolutely ruin it.  The whole point to microblogging is "the timeline" 

Messages coming in at different speeds or coming from different servers who might not be in sync time wise can end up causing a lot of trouble.  You start to get scenarios where, for example, all of someone's tweets for the day aren't delivered to their followers until 11pm when a server problem is fixed.  Then the receiving server has to decide whether all those messages get marked based on the reader's time of receipt or the senders time of post.

In e-mail this is an easy thing because messages are treated as individual entities.  But in a service like twitter where the updates are part of a timeline and not marked as read or unread things can get confusing. 

If you insert stalled messages in at their time of post the reader is likely to miss them because they'll be checking for "tweets" posted after the last time they checked.  If you in turn insert stalled messages into the time line at the time of their receipt you completely kill the linear aspect of the service. 

Ever wonder why all these IM compatibility initiatives have died on the vine?  Its because its next to impossible to create a federated service that works in real time.   It may be possible to federate a Twitter like service but its one heck of a challenge and not one that's going to be solved by Identi.ca's fairly simplistic implementation.

So Twitter has some competition, sort of...

Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services.

If you've become interested in the paradigm changing model of communication popularized by Twitter but have been frustrated by Twitter's frequent down time or other shortcomings - then Identi.ca could be for you.

Sounds very exciting doesn't it?  All your prayers have been answered you disenfranchised Twitter lovers.  But wait, there's more...

Coming "Soon"

Identi.ca just launched today but lists a number of features it says are coming "soon," including SMS, URL shortening, cross posting to Twitter and other services, a more AJAXy interface and much, much more. Exciting.

There is no "replies" tab on Identi.ca, but Twitter users will already be accustomed to that, right? We hope that functionality will come to Idneti.ca quickly.

What now?  But...But...I thought this was the deliverance? 

OK, all joking aside, this is something I've mentioned before and something that happens to be a really big pet peeve of mine.  Open Source is not a feature unless you actively plan to use the source to improve the product.  Otherwise it's useless to you. 

The only reason this half baked offering is getting any press attention at all is because its Open Source.  If not for that it would be laughable.  Not only is it inferior to Twitter in every conceivable way but its built with basically no resources so if everyone does rush to it you can expect it to crash faster and more often than Twitter does. 

Oh, and on that note, if everyone rushes over there one thing they won't find is an API.  That's right, dig a little deeper and you find this isn't really even as "open" as Twitter in that it doesn't have an API (support for the Twitter API is another "planned feature"). 

So basically its just like Twitter it just lacks everything you love about Twitter.  

The one thing I will give it credit for is that its the first product (if you can call it that) to demonstrate a model for a federated microblogging service (meaning others could put up their own compatible microblogging services and exchange messages between them).  But since the site only seems to be coming up sporadically for me I can't look into that to see how effective their model is. 

So while this could be the start of something significant right now the offering is pretty weak.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm an advocate of Open Source but if these initiatives want to succeed than they have to create products that can compete in the marketplace with closed source options. 

Otherwise they're just wasting everyone's time.