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.

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Barring the relatively annoying Sarah Austin / Flixwagon “controversy” of the past few days, no mobile streaming video service gets as much coverage as Qik. It seems like the Qik client fell into all the right hands early in its release as celwebrities all over the blogosphere fell in love. Despite the fact that Qik was in private beta, it seems like everyone managed to get their hands on it. Qik didn’t have the most features and it didn’t have the prettiest UI, but it had buzz and buzz is everything. Fast forward to today and Qik has continued to maintain much of its early momentum as it shows off a restyled website, new handset compatibility and the announcement that Qik is now available to the world as a public beta. No, the iPhone version isn’t quite ready for the public yet, but a handful of Windows Mobile handsets are now supported along with a variety of newer S60 handsets including the E66, E71, N78 and N96. So if you’ve been wanting to check out Qik but couldn’t find a version compatible with your phone, or you’re one of 12 people around the world who couldn’t find their way into the closed beta, hit the read link and you’ll be streaming in no time.

[Via AAS]

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