Recently, Google announced that Jaiku, the microblogging service acquired in 2007, will be ported to the Google App Engine, and its code will be open sourced. On the Google Code Blog, Vic Gundora, VP of Engineering, wrote: “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. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform” There has been much interest in decentralized microblogging over the past year, due mostly to the work done by Evan Prodromou with his Laconi.ca software. In addition, there’s the OpenMicroblogging specification which allows different microblogging services to communitcate with each other. With Jaiku going open source, it is very likely that we could see a developer make it compatible with the OpenMicroblogging specification. Time will tell.