Jaiku To Shut Down In January

Google announced last Friday that they will be shutting down Jaiku and Buzz, which comes with little surprise as the web giant focuses its attention on its new social network, Google+.

Jaiku, the Helsinki based mobile social service that allowed you to send short updates to your friends, was acquired by Google in 2007. But after gaining over 40 million users on Google+, Google has shifted away from Jaiku, which never gained much traction after its initial core of users.

Google’s acquisition of Jaiku was largely seen as a talent acquisition, which makes it somewhat unsurprising the project became stagnant, was open sourced, and is now shutting down completely.  Co-founder Jyri Engeström is no longer at Google, and is now working on ditto, a personalized recommendations app.

Jaiku will officially close on the 15th of January. The source code was released in January of 2009, and is available under the Apache License.