Signs of Life at Jaiku: Does it Matter?
August 29th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 5 CommentsTweet This
Microblogging service Jaiku is suddenly showing signs of life again – for the first time since its acquisition by Google back in January. After a few days offline, they returned with a blog entry and a couple of announcements: Jaiku is now running in one of Google’s data centers (though apparently the long-promised port to App Engine is not yet done), and they’ve opened up invitations. Though there’s still no open signup, any Jaiku member can invite an unlimited number of new members.
But the question has to be asked: does it matter? If Jaiku had managed to reopen with fanfare a month or two back, when Twitter was having severe uptime problems, it might have stolen the microblogging spotlight. Now, though, with Twitter humming along smoothly, it seems destined to be just another also-ran. While I won’t rule out the possibility of exciting innovations (or the traffic boost that could come from things like integration with existing Google accounts), it remains true that the leading service is the one where conversations are already taking place.
Tags: jaiku, microblogging, twitter
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Jaiku’s still around? That’s so cute.
add sms support and they could get a lot of new users, still upset about twitter’s move with non-us users-
maique,
It already has SMS support.
Jaiku has more emphasis on conversation than Twitter. In Twitter single posts are separate and their permalinks don’t contain any commentary.
In Jaiku you can view the original post and the comments easily from one place.
I think all these services are a load of cack. Seems to me they are designed an run by people living in San Fran/Palo Alto who really have lives so different from your average human in terms of communication and the need to live the life on the net.
Pownce is a no hoper, Jaiku is a no hoper and quite how twitter has survived is a bloody miracle