When Google purchased Jaiku in 2007, I thought they were manipulating chess pieces for something big. You combine the microblogging service with their enhancements to Google Apps and their work on the Google-backed Android platform, I thought Jaiku would end up being an integral part of some big communications package by Google. Well, apparently, Google doesn’t always follow through.

Google has allowed Jaiku to rot, according to a story on Ars Technica. Users are complaining about such things as:

• Constant server outages with the external feed servers
• Outages with the IM bots
• Extremely slow servers when they are online

Making matters worse, the Jaiku development team has been silent. No news of new developments (which were promised when Google took over). No news of fixing the server problems.

Sure enough, when I tried to even view the Jaiku Team page, it took quite a bit of time to load up the page. But at least the servers are working right now. And the feed now says they are working on the problem. It is funny, though, because until Ars posted this story, there was nothing on the Jaiku page. They announced they’re joining Google on October 15th last year, then nothing until yesterday.

Is Google Getting Too Big?

That is the question. Google is getting into EVERYTHING. And perhaps they are overextending themselves and that is why they cannot follow through with everything. To let Jaiku rot after acquiring them is a real disservice. Users have also complained about poor support on other Google services. When Google acquired Urchin (eventually turned into Google Analytics), they were overwhelmed by server load and user support requests and it took them some time to catch up with it.