In October 2007, Google bought the Finnish social networking site Jaiku. In the following couple of years, they somehow managed to do absolutely nothing with it, even as rival Twitter rose in popularity. Today, co-founder Jyri Engeström is leaving Google.
When we last talked to him in May, Engeström seemed to be enjoying what he was working on at Google. And as he told us in January, “We’re not dying, we’re morphing,” after Google decided to cease internal development of Jaiku. Rather than killing off Jaiku completely, like it did with Dodgeball and others, Google decided to allow Jaiku to be ported over to App Engine, and open-sourced. Sadly, still not much has come of that. And now, it’s unclear how much Engeström will have to do with the project from this point on.
The reason is that he’s moving on to other things. As he notes in his tweet, he’s aiming to do something that “makes meaning,” borrowing from something Guy Kawasaki says in one of his books. We know a little bit about what that will be.
First and foremost, we hear Engeström had a strong desire to move back to his native Finland. Following the Google acquisition of Jaiku, Engeström and his family moved to San Francisco to work at the Googleplex. While here, he did manage to make connections that seem to point us in the direction of what he’ll be doing next.
One of those connections is Chris Messina, an important figure in the open web development community. Word is that Engeström and Messina are working on something around the term “social objects,” which Engeström coined. This will likely have something to do with Activitystrea.ms, another project Messina is working on, we hear.
Another project that will likely take up some of Engeström’s time is helping his wife with her new startup, Thinglink. The service’s landing page (it’s in closed beta) describes it as “a way to share design collections and photos.”
Both of those things seems like they may be more of projects though, than startups. So you can probably look for Engeström to try his hand at another one of those soon as well. It seems likely that upon his return to Finland, Engeström may also do some angel investing of his own.
Most recently, Engeström gave an interesting presentation with some thoughts on social elements. I’ve embedded it below.
As for Google, their legacy of acquiring startups in a hot space, only to run them into the ground and lose their founders, continues. At least they got a solid two years out of Engeström.
“… borrowing from something Guy Kawasaki [???] in his book.”
… as he tweeted?
“… borrowing from something Guy Kawasaki [MASTICATED] in his book.”
First
-1
Google = Google: operate, or guys leave early
Google is like an old lonely woman that sits home and orders crap off of home shopping network.. they buy shit they don’t want or need then hide it in the closet or give it to someone that doesn’t want it! Blah Google
I was an early user of Jaiku and was very disappointed by how it languished under Google. Now in somewhat similar fashion FriendFeed appears to be going down a similar path. It will be interesting to see if their key developers will suffer a similar fate later down the line as part of the team at Facebook. I hope not.
seem like a guy that wanted to do his contractual two years and bounce. nothing new here
Hikoo is officially braindead, on life support and being cared for in the unofficial deadpool?
It looks nicer than Twitter, actually.
I thought it was better than twitter actually. oh well!
Sometime I think that Google just bought Jaiku to scared the investors of Tweeter letting them know that an exist as a buyout will no longer be an option.
(aka “killing the buzz”, if tweeter was so good they would have bought tweeter and not Jaiku kind of talk).
Jyri is one of the most advanced minds on online sociality. Another term he coined is object-centric sociality (http://zengestr...ome_social.html) which in 2005 was very refreshing. His secret weapon is that he cares. He deeply and profoundly cares.
MG, this piece more suitable for perezhilton.com…
a) Jyri is awesome. Jaiku was great and if Google had been smart they would have had a Twitter contender. They don’t.
b) Back in 2006 Thinglink was “open sourced bar-codes for crafts people” though it may have changed
http://mbites.c..._crafts-people/
I hope he’s not moving back to Finland full-time. He’s one of the brightest guys I know in this space and if neither one of us are in SF, I don’t know how we’re going to bump into each other
seventeenth
I know four very talented people that have left Google in the last couple of weeks. They universally complained about poor management and lack of new opportunities.
Google is no longer “the” place to work.