"While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers. Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering at Google blogged. "With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine."

Now that's interesting.

Google wasn't able to make a go of Jaiku on their own - but as an open source effort that can be used as a roll your own Twitter, that could be very cool.

I can think of plenty of reasons why an organization would want their own specific microblogging service, customized and privatized to their needs. While Jaiku did not beat out Twitter for the hearts and minds of the general public, I suspect that an open source Jaiku could make some real inroads in the custom development space where Twitter does not exist.