Jaiku : Googles twitter variant

For many who may not know, Google has its own Twitter variant and its called Jaiku. As mentioned on Jaiku website "Jaiku is a part of Google. The service is maintained by volunteer Google engineers on their spare time."

While Twitter started as a side project in March of 2006, Google had acquired Jaiku in October of 2007 for an estimated $12 million. As a matter of fact blogger.com which is currently owned by Google was owned by Twitter's Founders. Over the years there are number of unsuccessful investments made by Google, for instance in 2005 Google acquired social-networking service Dodgeball, which enables people to link up using text messages sent to mobile phones. But the company never really did anything with it, and the founders left in disgust in April.

With Jaiku hardly able to drive any traffic, Google finally moved Jaiku to Google Apps, going open source. With this move many experts believe that an open source Jaiku could make some real inroads in the custom development space. Jaiku Engine will enable users at the individual, group and organization levels to run their own micro blogging services through the Google App Engine. The Jaiku Engine will also provide support to open standard authentication, which Twitter is already using. This will thus allow the creation of a freely available open source micro-blogging service.

Identi.ca is another open source variant of Twitter's microblogging service.