When Microsoft announced that it was transitioning 30 million active users to WordPress, it looked like Automattic (the company behind WP.com) would finally be able to surpass Blogger after years of maintaining a distant second to Google’s favorite publishing platform.

Apparently it seems that Blogger’s embrace of Google Apps could help the platform maintain its enormous lead by tapping into an audience just as large.

Google Apps users have been asking for Blogger and now, with out recently launched infrastructure improvement, they can use Blogger for free with their Google Apps accounts. We’re excited to provide Apps users with this great tool to have their voices heard on the web.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration web apps use by more than 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. (Blogger Buzz)

Note: Emphasis mine. read more

Google have decided to open source the Jaiku Engine and release it under the Apache license on Google Code. The actual Jaiku service won’t close, but neither is Google supporting it. Instead, the service will live on thanks to volunteers. Or, in the words of Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering:

As we mentioned last April, 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.

Jaiku’s Jyri stresses that this isn’t necessarily the end of Jaiku, and that doom-mongerers should wait and see what’ll happen with the site. This in a comment to the announcement on the Jaikido Blog:

While the future is uncertain (it always is), it’s also worth noting that the Jaiku that exists today was developed by independent people who were brought together by an interest to create a cool tool for sharing presence and conversation.

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When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans three years ago, I was stranded in the upstate of Louisiana without my most basic tools. I was there for several weeks with only dial-up Web access and a borrowed computer to help me out. Yet, I managed to update my online diary twice a day during my evacuation and continue to operate my then-newest site Plagiarism Today.

Now, three years later, I find myself in a similar position. As I am writing this, I am evacuated for Hurricane Gustav while tending to a new blog, Inelegant Solutions (see link above) and several older ones. I also have to worry about writing jobs and consulting work even though my computers and my files are mostly packed up.

However, this time around, I am better prepared. Not only was the evacuation more smooth, but I am better able to maintain my presence online despite barely being able to see the Web.

However, making that happen requires a great deal of preparation and taking several steps before anything happens. For bloggers who want to keep writing no matter what, I would strongly urge the following steps. read more

Jaiku has found its way back online, now hosted at the Google datacenters, but not within the Google Apps Engine as was rumored. From the official blog post:

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.

Jaiku is still running its original engine, however, there are some news, like a new TOS and unlimited invites. I didn’t know they were scarce?

Jaiku is down right now, but it might be a good thing that it is. Jaiku Invites blog reports that Google is moving the microblogging service that could have been a serious Twitter contender to the Google Apps cloud setup. This could mean a number of thing, one being that we’ll soon be able to get internal Jaiku-ish communication within Google Apps, but the most prominent result of this should be better uptime.

It is my opinion that Jaiku could’ve taken its share of users from Twitter, as well as given other social web sites and app a run for its money, with its very lifestreamish take on microblogging. However, the site never got the push it needed, and it feel marginalized to me. Fun fact though: In Sweden, where I live, Jaiku is the microblogging site.