Next09: Video Interview With Jyri Engeström (Jaiku / Google)

I just finished moderating a panel with Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström about emerging social behavior on the web at the Next09 conference in Hamburg, and I got the chance to speak with both of them separately afterwards and recorded part of the conversations on video. The first one I’m featuring is the short talk I had with Engeström, the Finnish entrepreneur who left his senior product manager position at Nokia in 2006 to co-found one of the first micro-publishing services, Jaiku.

The micro-sharing application was launched the same year in private beta and became somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (which was nowhere near as popular as it is nowadays) and Pownce (which never really took off and was ultimately put out of its misery by Six Apart). Jaiku was famously acquired by Google at the end of 2007 before it hit mainstream success and has since often been cited as one of the search engine company’s infamous zombie acquisitions, with little or no further development happening on the service since the takeover and the original founders moving on to doing other things on the company’s payroll.

Then Google discontinued a number of services in the beginning of this year, and Jaiku was widely reported to be one of the axed products, but Engeström swiftly responded to those reports with a blog post saying that Jaiku wasn’t dying but instead morphing (into an open-source platform for building micro-publishing services on Google App Engine).

Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are.

(sorry about the occasional sound glitches)

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4512841&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1