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Last week, Google announced that they were discontinuing or at the very least ceasing development of several services, including Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and The Mashup Editor. The shutdown of the latter two was announced on the Google Code blog by VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, along with a statement regarding their micro-blogging service Jaiku.  Many other blogs stated that the service was spared albeit without further plans for the Twitter-like service.

Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström responded to the reports today in a blog post claiming that the service will turn into something more interesting than he had originally intended.  Jaiku will be ported to Google App Engine and its code will be released under the Apache license, while existing accounts will still be able to use the tool the same way they’ve been able to ever since it launched.

So it would seem that Google did not acquire Jaiku in order to launch a Twitter competitor, but does that really matter?

In Jyri’s words:

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

OK then. I guess we shall see.

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