Jaiku Co-Founder Jyri Engestrom Leaving Google

Jyri Engeström co-founded a social network in Finland called Jaiku. A couple of years ago Google bought his company out and did nothing with it. Between the time that Google bought his company and now, Twitter took off and Jyri decided to leave. Jyri took on another project at Google and the search engine company ceased internal development of Jaiku. Jaiku was added to the Google App Engine and was open sourced.

Jyri left Google in order to “make meaning” out of another project. The tweet he wrote was “It was my last day at Google today. As for what’s next, @guykawasaki nailed it by saying: make meaning http://ping.fm/TUBnO.”

After the acquisition, Jyri and his family moved to San Francisco. But ever since then his family wanted to move back to Finland. Jyri and Chris Messina are rumored to be working on a new project together that involves “social objects.” Messina is a board member of the OpenID foundation.

Jyri is also helping his wife on a start-up called Thinglink. Thinglink will focus on sharing collections and photos.

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