Online micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku have gained a lot of notoriety in the past 2 years, but much of niche-leading Twitter’s press has been due to its frequent outages. Now rumors are circulating that Jaiku might be increasing stability by migrating to Google’s App Engine cloud computing infrastructure after Google acquired them over ten months ago.

Not much has changed about the Jaiku service since it was acquired by Google in October of last year. The application has neither been migrated into one of Google’s data centers nor integrating with any of the other Google applications. Google may have been working to find a way to help Jaiku scale in order to handle the massive server load common among its other products.

Acquiring Jaiku was a surprise move by Google last year since they passed up what is commonly believed to be the leading microblogging service, Twitter. The decision could have been based on Twitter’s founder, Evan Williams, who already cashed a hefty check from Google when it acquired his previous venture Blogger. The other potential reason for the decision was that Jaiku has more features for lifestreaming than Twitter which is a pure text service.

The rumor about Jaiku being released on the Google App Engine platform was spawned by their service outage over the weekend. This caused the fan blog Jaiku Invites to investigate more closely. The traceroute of packets traveling to Jaiku’s servers suddenly seems to end on Google’s network, though no official announcement has been made.

Questions still remain as to whether the application has simply been migrated or will unleash new features upon its return. The move could simply be an attempt to stabilize the service, although Jaiku users hope this is a sign that Google is ready to invest in the platform.

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Entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:32 am under Google, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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