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.

Google has announced that they will not be supporting several of their services any longer.  This includes Google Video Uploads, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Mashup Editor.  The search engine company is shutting down the aforementioned services in order to keep efforts focused on core products and services.

Google Video blog post written by Michael Cohen: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service. “  Google Video will just become another video search engine and I’m assuming anyone that wants to upload videos will be routed to YouTube.

Google Catalog Search blog post written by Punit Soni: “In recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow [January 15, 2009], we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”  Google Catalog Search started in 2001 using OCR to search text of product catelogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Google Notebook blog post written by Raj Krishnan: “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up.”  Although Google Notebook will no longer be supported, they recommend using other Notebook-like services such as SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in GMail, and Google Bookmarks.

Google Code blog post written by Vic Gundotra: “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.”  Dodgeball will be discontinued in the next couple of months.  And the Mashup Editor will be shutting down in favor of the App Engine infrastructure.

Regretfully due to economic conditions, Google had to lay off a large number of contractors and about 100 recruiters.  Google has also had to relocate engineers from external offices to headquarters at Mountain View, California.

“Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core,” stated Alan Eustace on The Google Blog.

The economy as a whole has created turbulent times for the search engine company, but rest assured I expect them to bounce back as we see start seeing changes on Capitol Hill.