Jaiku was a social networking,

micro-blogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

and

lifestreaming Lifestreaming is an act of documenting and sharing aspects of one's daily social experiences online, via a lifestream website that collects the things person chooses to publish (e.g. photos, tweets, videos) and presents them in reverse-chronolog ...

service comparable to

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

on October 9, 2007. When Jaiku Ltd was an independent company, its head office was in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the capital, primate, and most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of Uusimaa in southern Finland, and has a population of . The city ...

History

Jaiku was created in February 2006 by

-based Jaiku Ltd. The founders of Jaiku chose the name because the posts on Jaiku resembled Japanese

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...

. Also, the indigenous Sami people of

have traditionally shared stories by singing joiks. On January 14, 2009, it was announced that Google would be open-sourcing the product but would "no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase," instead leaving development to a "passionate volunteer team of Googlers". The financial terms of the deal were not released. It was said that the Jaiku team would also help Google on its upcoming G phone project. New user registrations were closed. On March 12, 2009, Jaiku was re-launched on Google's App Engine platform and on March 13, 2009 the source code to JaikuEngine (the open source equivalent of the jaiku.com codebase) was released. The intent was to compete in the enterprise microblogging arena with a fully customizable microblogging offer. On October 14, 2011, Google announced that Jaiku would be shut down by January 15, 2012. This announcement came around the same time Google shut down

Google Buzz Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages an ...

and

iGoogle iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage) was a customizable Ajax-based start page or personal web portal launched by Google in May 2005. It was discontinued on November 1, 2013,Google SupportiGoogle's Decommission/ref> because the compan ...

's social features. On November 29, 2011, a group of former users launched Jaikuarchive.com – The Jaiku Presence archiver "to save an important part of our digital heritage." The original archive site shut down somewhere in 2014 and has since been offline. As of February 2019, the domain led to an error page on Google's servers.

Software

Jaiku consisted of a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

, a mobile website and a client application which acts as a replacement address book that runs on S60 phones. Jaiku was compatible with

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

S60 platform The S60 Platform (formerly Series 60 User Interface) was a software platform for smartphones that runs on top of the Symbian operating system. It was created by Nokia based on the 'Pearl' user interface from Symbian Ltd. It was introduced a ...

mobile devices through its Jaiku Mobile client software. The software allowed users to make posts through the software onto their Jaiku page. Jaiku released their

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

, which allowed programmers to make their own third party software components such as

Feedalizr feedalizr was a cross-platform, desktop social media aggregator built using Adobe Integrated Runtime that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites. Users can then use this application to update those sites from th ...

. One of the main differences between Jaiku and its competitor Twitter was Lifestream, an internet feed that shared users online activities utilizing other programs such as

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

for photos,

last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

for music, and location by mobile phone. Since Jaiku became open-source, the Lifestream function was removed.

Features

Jaiku.com allowed users to post their thoughts, opinions, and comments in regards to their lives or any other subject. The posts that users created were called "Jaikus" and users had the option of making them publicly visible or private. The site allowed users to keep in touch and interact with friends either through the website, or through the mobile application.

References

External links

JaikuEngine

JaikuEngine mailing list
{{Social network Defunct microblogging services Blog hosting services Discontinued Google acquisitions Online companies of Finland Internet properties disestablished in 2012 Internet properties established in 2006 2006 establishments in Finland 2012 disestablishments in Finland Defunct social networking services

History

Software

Features

See also

References

External links