14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that most small services that are purchased by larger ones either gain tremendous popularity in no time or end up in smoke, or at least they lose their most important figures. The latter situation occurred with Jaiku, the social networking site from Finland, which was acquired by Google in October 2007. However, up until the present the Finnish platform has not become another huge networking platform supported by Google. Seeing that this project reached a dead spot, co-founder Jyri Engeström has made the decision to leave the Mountain View company.
At the beginning of 2009, he declared that “We’re not dying, we’re morphing,” when Google stopped internal development of Jaiku. In spring, more precisely in May, Engeström was still enthusiastic about the new direction the Finnish platform was taking under Google’s supervision. The project was not totally terminated, unlike Dodgeball or others; it was merely ported over to App Engine, then open-sourced. Nonetheless, this move did not benefit Jaiku since it still has not obtained the much-craved popularity. Currently, it is unknown whether Engeström will still have a say in the development of the service.
It appears that he has decided to follow another direction in his career, one that 'makes meaning,' as he said in his tweet related to his last day at Google. The first step will probably be to relocate back to his native country, Finland, which he left when Google took over Jaiku and he moved with his family to San Francisco to continue his work at the Googleplex headquarters. The time he spent in the USA offered him the possibility to establish numerous professional connections and he now wants to use them to change the course of his career.
For instance, it seems that Engeström plans to cooperate with Chris Messina, a professional in the field of open web development. There are signs that the two of them are currently working on a new project focused around 'social objects,' as Engeström once stated.