By “Jaiku is the new Twitter”, we’re hardly suggesting it is a popular new microblogging site that may overtake the reigning king. No, that ship has sailed. We mean it never works anymore. Twitter seems to have been spending cash found during its recent funding round very well. It made a few key hires, sought a bit of outside help and now downtime is a thing of the past (for now at least). On the other hand you have Jaiku, the young scrapper with a promising future cut short by a Google acquisition. Let’s take a look at what we’ve seen from Jaiku since it was snatched up by the big G:
- Registration closed, invite only
- A huge spike in traffic, followed by a huge drop-off
- Server issues
- Downtime
- Moved to Google Apps engine
- Server issues
- Downtime
It becomes quite apparent that Google isn’t all too interested in the present community aspects of Jaiku. Instead, it has been hypothesized that Google was likely more interested in Jaiku’s mobile presence applications; a live phone book of sorts where users can view the status of each of their contacts and even post messages and replies from right within the app. Sounds like something that might be a pretty interesting addition to Android, no? Whether or not this is the case, it seems to be a fair assumption that Google doesn’t have much interest in the current Jaiku users. The service has been up and down all week and now users have been informed via the screen capture above, that Jaiku will be taking a vacation all weekend. As the message on Jaiku’s homepage suggests, now is probably a good time for Jaiku users to find other ways to communicate.
