Jaiku

Jaiku, the Finnish microblogging and presence-sharing service, died on the fifteenth of January 2012, having spent the final four years of its life in a condition of benign abandonment within Google’s vast estate. It was founded in Helsinki in 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, and acquired by Google in October 2007 for a sum undisclosed, at a moment when the question of which platform would define the social stream had not yet been settled. That question was settled without it.

New user registration was closed in 2008. In 2009, Google open-sourced the codebase and released it, with the faint ceremony of a thing set adrift, to the App Engine platform. It continued in this diminished form, tended by no one in particular, until the servers were finally stilled. It was six years old. Those who had used it remembered it as something thoughtful — a place that understood presence before presence became performance.