Jaiku

A month older than Twitter, bought by Google, shelved

Shut down
19902026

Jaiku was a Finnish microblogging service founded in February 2006, a month before Twitter, with threaded replies and automatic status from your phone. Google bought it in 2007, stopped developing it in 2009, open-sourced the code, and finally switched it off in January 2012.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2006
  2. February 2006 Launch
    Jaiku is founded

    In Helsinki, one month before Twitter.

  3. July 2006 Launch
    Jaiku opens

    Threaded replies and presence pulled automatically from your phone.

  4. 2007
  5. 9 October 2007 Acquisition
    Google buys Jaiku

    The team is later moved onto Android.

  6. 2009
  7. 14 January 2009 Decline
    Google stops developing it

    The code is open-sourced and handed to volunteers. Registrations close.

  8. 2011
  9. 14 October 2011 Shutdown announced
    Listed in Google's fall sweep

    Alongside Google Buzz.

  10. 2012
  11. 15 January 2012 Shutdown
    Jaiku closes

The site through time

Browse jaiku.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Jaiku Ltd 2006–2007 Founded Helsinki, founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen
Google 2007–2012 Acquisition Development stopped in 2009; the code was open-sourced

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google acquired Jaiku in October 2007, stopped developing it in January 2009, and announced on 14 October 2011 that it would close on 15 January 2012 as part of a round of closures the company called a fall sweep.

Our analysis: Jaiku was founded a month before Twitter and had better ideas, including threaded conversations and presence pulled from your phone. Google bought it, moved the team onto Android, and left the product to volunteers. By the time it was formally closed it had been abandoned for nearly three years.

History [edit]

Helsinki, one month early

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen founded Jaiku in Helsinki in February 2006 and launched in July. The name came from the Japanese haiku and from the joik, the traditional song form of the Sami people of northern Finland.

It did things Twitter took years to reach. Replies were threaded under the post they answered, so a Jaiku entry was a conversation rather than a stream of disconnected lines. Its mobile client pulled presence off the phone itself, so your feed could show where you were and whether you were in a call, without you typing anything. It had a European, design-led sensibility that made it a favourite among people who built things for a living.

Bought and shelved

Google acquired Jaiku on 9 October 2007. Registration was invitation-only for a period, then in January 2009 Google announced it would stop actively developing the product, hand it to a volunteer team of employees, and open-source the code. The Jaiku team went to work on Android.

JaikuEngine was released in March 2009, rebuilt on App Engine, and pitched at companies wanting internal microblogging. Nobody much wanted that.

Fall sweep

On 14 October 2011 Google published a post titled "A fall sweep", listing products it was closing. Jaiku was on it, with a closing date of 15 January 2012. Google Buzz was on the same list.

Twitter, launched a month after Jaiku with a worse feature set, is still here. Jaiku is one of the clearest cases of a good product losing to timing, distribution and the fact that its owner had somewhere more interesting to put the engineers.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Open Diary Invented the comment, in 1998 1998–2014 Posterous Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off 2008–2013 Pownce Eighteen months, and invitations sold on eBay 2007–2008

Sources [edit]

  1. A fall sweep Google Official Blog 14 October 2011 [archived]
  2. Jaiku Bought By Google TechCrunch 9 October 2007 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).