Jaiku to be released as open source code ?

Seen on TechCrunch:

In the wake of announcing its first round of layoffs this afternoon, Google has released several blog posts detailing the upcoming shutdown of a number of services (compiled here by Danny Sullivan). Included among the upcoming closures are: Google Notebooks, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Video, Google Mashup Editor, and future development of Jaiku (though the service will live on).

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Jaiku is currently being ported to Google App Engine, and will be released as an open source project on Google Code. However, while there will be no further development from Google, it will continue to stay online.

Google's activity is more evidence of a strategic shift away from its FreeConomic funding of anything that Moved 2.0 and a move to reinforce areas that make real money - no surprises there, its good old Stick To Your Knitting stuff (though some still seem to cling on to the Olde Worlde in hope).

More interesting is the potential release of Jaiku as open sourceware, I thought it was a better crafted service than Twitter when it came out (though of course Twitter and its Ecosystem has come on in leaps and bounds) , and I suspect there is quite a lot of value left in it for people who want to build their own services.

Readers of this blog will know we see these systems more as modern forms of Unified Comms systems than "microblogging" (that being just one potential application, and Jaiku was at the time more integrated into mobile thinking (thatw as its root) where a lot of the converged web growth will be in the next few years.

Update - Ian Betteridge notes that Identi.ca is open source and still to make an impact on the Twitter faithful - community is clearly king in social media. My thought though was one may use Jaiku for purposes other than social microblogging.

Update 2 - a few hours later, and it appears that Identi.ca has just got some funding. Interesting.....