Jaikido Blog

As many of you know, we’ve been offline for the last few days, working to address an issue with a server. We’re back, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.

We’ve now moved Jaiku to a Google data center. This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we’ve moved, we’ll need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and privacy policy. Head here to do that.

As a special thank you for your patience, we’d like to throw a little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

We appreciate your support!

It’s been a while since we’ve given an update on the progress of the porting of Jaiku to Google App Engine, and many of you have been keen to know how work is progressing.

It’s as if we were retrofitting a locomotive with a powerful new engine. Everything under the classic body gets upgraded.

Just like on the inside the locomotive is composed of a drive train, transmission, and so on, Jaiku is composed of services for features like fetching Web feeds, receiving and sending SMS, the IM bot, and Jaiku Mobile. We’re reimplementing them all so that they work well with the App Engine. In some cases we’re expanding the App Engine platform itself. We’re taking the opportunity to learn from porting Jaiku to benefit both our users and make App Engine better.

The port to App Engine will also benefit third-party developers who are writing cool applications for Jaiku. In the process of rewriting Jaiku’s Web site on Django, we’re improving the way the site is written so 3rd party developers will have greater control over the system and can write applications that provide richer features to their users.

Those who’ve payed attention know how excited we are about open Web standards like OAuth, Microformats, and OpenID. The port to AppEngine is an opportunity to add more support for them to the Jaiku platform and contribute back to the community by implementing support for the standards we love. For example, the new Jaiku API will support OAuth.

The biggest benefit for the Jaiku community is that we’ll be able to grow and support many more users. Where before we used MySQL, now we’re using the more scalable App Engine data store and an improved data model. We’ll be moving existing users’ data to the new architecture to make sure Jaiku scales up for you and all your friends.

So, where are we now? We’re putting the finishing touches on the entire system. As any developer knows, sometimes there are surprises, so we’ll periodically let you know how things are progressing.

We appreciate your patience and can’t wait to open up Jaiku to everyone!

Update: All services are now up and running again. According to our data center provider, the power failure that affected Jaiku this Sunday was caused by the meltdown of a mains switch and disrupted the servers of over 8,000 customers.

A power failure at about 9am PST (7pm EET) today at the data center provider where Jaiku’s servers are located caused an outage on jaiku.com. We are back up and running, but it will take some more time before all services are fully operational. We apologize for the service break and are working to get all functions back to normal as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

Update: the issue with our SMS provider (see details) has now been solved and the SMS service is functional again worldwide. Thanks for your patience!

Folks, our SMS provider has let us know they will be performing maintenance on their system on Tuesday, June 10th, between 00:00 - 06:00 AM Central European time. This is going to affect the Jaiku SMS services worldwide. We’re expecting two short outages within this time period. Our provider’s assured us they’ll do their best to minimize the disturbance.

Recently a bunch of you have been ruminating about the fate of Jaiku. We know. It is frustrating. We believe the migration to Google App Engine will result in improved stability, so we made the hard call to invest all of our effort in finishing up the port rather than do what was needed to keep up our old servers up to date (it is hard to keep up a service of this scale with 1GB RAM…).

Also, contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too. Thanks for sticking with us!

We’ve been working quietly for a while to port Jaiku to Google infrastructure. Today we’re taking off our welding goggles to announce Jaiku will be one of the first apps to run on the new Google App Engine.

The Google App Engine enables applications to leverage powerful Google technologies and scale up to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

Jaiku will be fully deployed on the Google App Engine in the near future. Andy & co. are working hard to ensure the port is a success and we will make a further announcement once the port has been completed.

It’s finally here - a SMS shortcode for our U.S. users to enjoy! If you have a U.S. phone, you can now post Jaikus by texting to 30300.

You can also receive notifications of new posts from your friends and follow channels. For a complete list of functions, see our SMS help. Jaiku is free; standard operator SMS charges apply.

Jaiku members can activate their mobile number at http://jaiku.com/settings/mobile. The SMS service should currently function on all U.S. carriers except T-Mobile. (We are planning to add T-Mobile later). As always, please let us know your feedback on the Jaiku channel.

For those of you heading to SXSW, this should make coordinating easier :)

If you access Jaiku using third-party applications, you might have noticed that the apps you use are displaying a message asking you to sign in with your API key. Here’s why: a Jaiku user recently let us know about a security vulnerability in an iGoogle gadget developed by a third party. The gadget was exposing user API keys in certain instances, and while we haven’t seen any reports of malicious use, we’ve pulled the gadget down and are working with the developer to correct the issue. We’ve also reset all Jaiku API keys to restore the security of accessing Jaiku using third-party apps.

To get your new API key, go to http://jaiku.com/api. And, as always, please exercise caution when sharing your API key with third parties — don’t share it anywhere you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing your password.

Over the past days we’ve been working to address the performance issues some of you have experienced lately. Starting on Wednesday, January 16, at 12:01 am PST (08:01 GMT), we will take Jaiku offline for approximately 24 hours to complete a set of related maintenance operations. Once things are back up and running, any posts made before December 16, 2007, will be temporarily unavailable as we move them to another database to make Jaiku even faster. Once we’ve completed the move, all your previous posts, feeds, and comments will be made available to you again.

We know there’s never a good time for downtime, but we want to get Jaiku back into top form as quickly as possible, so we can focus on all the other things we have in store for you. Thanks again for your patience, and — as always — let us know if you have any questions.

It’s been a while since we’ve given you a decent update on Jaiku, and it looks like more than a few of you are wondering what’s going on and what’s in store for the future. That’s completely our fault — between joining the Google team, the holiday season, and all the new stuff we’ve been working on, it’s been a hectic three months. Here’s a quick update:

First, we know the Jaiku site is currently not as responsive as it should be. The issue is that users (some of them spammers) are starting to add new feeds to their accounts at a more rapid pace, so we’re working on cleaning up the database to get the site back to its normal level of responsiveness. We should have everything sorted out soon; in the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Second, I know you’re all excited to hear what’s next for Jaiku and what we’ve been working on since joining Google. To be honest, a lot of our time in the early going was spent on getting to know Google. And, of course, a little R&R during the holidays. But we’ve also been working hard on the next steps for Jaiku, and are already making progress on what I think are some cool new ways to help you stay connected with the people you care about. We can’t share any of the specifics right now, but stay tuned.

And, as always, don’t be shy about letting us know what you’d like to see from Jaiku, how you think Jaiku might complement the Google products you use, and how you’d like to be involved in all this. We are definitely listening!