We read with interest and nodding heads to Mulley.net’s blog post on Google’s use of Jaiku:

“When Google snapped up Jaiku, the first thing they did was to stop sign-ups to the service. Over time the service with Jaiku has gotten worse and worse with no new iterations at all. You can see from various messages that the Jaiku boys are working hard and learning loads but it has been ruminated that Jaiku was purchased for the brains and not the service. A recent comment from one of their people in the Jaiku Dev channels seems to suggest that it’s true and Google is just letting them tank. …It’s understandable in a way that Google would get these guys sooner rather an expensive later but jeez, why let it die? Just so Yahoo! or Microsoft could not build it out?”

To add our thoughts to Damien’s, Jaiku are suffering from scale issues which are causing performance problems. And people are just not as forgiving as they are with Twitter (whose infrastructure goes down almost daily). Since Google bought Jaiku there is an expectation that their service will be funded and fully supported by the Google parent company, but in actual fact it seems they are still struggling for resources same as before.

In addition, over the Christmas period Jaiku, whose population seems to be more office based, died down and for some reason Twitter came back to life and got busier than ever! Long live Twitter?

Our thanks to Mulley.net for the thought.