Is there any point in me introducing Twitter? It’s hit the mainstream press now, so like Facebook if you’re online reading this blog you probably have heard of the latest internet hit. But have you heard of Jaiku? My guess is probably not.

Jaiku was founded in 2006 and then purchased by Google a year later, it’s basically a “twitter clone”. It generated a fair bit of publicity last week amongst Google’s announcements that it was culling a number of it’s offerings.

Now I know Jaiku is never going to beat Twitter just like Microsoft Live Search is never going to beat Google. Twitter is now the defacto standard for micro blogging. So why then title a blog post in such a way that it indicates that there is some scope for a challenge?

The answer is in this paragraph from the Google announcement.

we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. 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

I can see so many uses for Twitter internally in a law firm. IT notifications of service interruption, legal project teams working together globally on cases using it to communicate, marketing teams communicating pitch information, you could fill a page with knowledge management use alone etc. The problem though is security. You may use Twitter now, but I bet you keep your tweets vague enough to not give any personal or confidential information away?

Now with an open source Jaiku, you can have an internal Twitter. Hosted on your own secure network. Keeping it in your own network means you don’t have to limit the content. Also with it being open source you can guarantee that soon there will be Adobe Air clients, BlackBerry clients, Mac clients etc etc

This could do for internal social networks what Twitter has already done for external!