In a time when there are so many avenues of monetization and a vast audience for web services we are also seeing companies shutting off their operations and going open source.
Reddit and Mugshot did it earlier and now its time for Jaiku.
It was in 2007 when google announced acquisition of jaiku when microblogging was just taking off, although it did add to the hype created by microbloging services like twitter.
A few months ago came announcement of Google discontinuing or ceasing development of various services including jaiku and now as anticipated earlier, Google in a recent blog post announced the availability of jaiku’s source code on google code,the code repository owned by google.
Now when the jaiku’s code is launched it would give rise to many white labeled micro blogging services either owned by individuals or marketers.
This would in turn give leeway to many marketeers to launch their white labeled micro blogging sites to interact with their target audiences.
Why companies go open source?
Today almost every new internet startup finds it difficult to survive despite decreasing server costs and even biggies are no different. The primary reason being that there are too many services already in the market and the one which attracts most attention through media gets the lead.
The another reason is advertising cost remains high for startups not able to generate enough hype through social media and other sources. One more factor which adds salt to the wound is the low adoption of advertising by subscribers because users can flee instantly when they feel that they are being targeted by ads due to the free nature of the platform. This is the reason why even the likes of Youtube and Facebook are finding it tough to earn revenue inline with their web traffic.
Companies then try to recover their cost or attain popularity with their app being made available as open source and attending to a large scale audience with paid support services even though free development is provided by open source community.
As they say one men’s loss is another’s gain, the availablity of open source apps or click and install scripts are also giving birth to entrepreneurship mostly through various home portal ventures. These sites are cropping up in classified, job, news portals and in numerous fields. One may not be able to spot them as they are so well tweaked in appearances and programming.
The main power of open source could be seen by development of laconi.ca,fondly known as open source twitter clone. This project has grown leap and bounds through their open source nature and provide even more features than twitter itself.
We would like to know about your experience with open source technology and your view on white labeling of web?
