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Guys, my thoughts exactly. No new people are joining Jaiku, and increasingly the interesting people that were Jaiku-exclusive have at least started crossposting to Twitter, even Jyri. And the features that were once unique to Jaiku (aggregation, mobile client, location aware) are now being adopted by others so the head start Jaiku had is almost completely gone.

For a while I held on to the thought that maybe all that Jaiku talent was working on a breakthrough IM/address book/location app or service for Android, given the brilliance of the original Jaiku mobile app. But alas, Android is devoid of any signs of Jaiku. Or how about using Jaiku’s great ideas to get over the severe limitations in Gmail contacts, or as an intranet tool for companies, institutions and networks using Google Apps for Domains? Nothing that Jaiku ever stood for is finding its way in anything Google is bringing to market.

We’ve seen some vague hints (http://joi.jaiku.com/presence/47070668), some announcement on running on top of Google Apps now, but that doesn’t take away the feeling that Jaiku has become a retired platform. And that is a sad thing, because looking back, Jaiku has never seriously aimed to make it to the top. If it would have been marketed more, remained open for new users, and integrated into other Google services I’m convinced it could have ended on top, not just over Twitter, but as a leader in a category that now has dozens of services figuring out how to integrate services in a way Jaiku had nailed years ago.

My conclusion is that Jaiku was acquired for its talent, period. I can’t believe the founders of Jaiku had that in mind as a desired exit when they were entrepreneurs, nor when they signed the dotted line under the terms in the contract. An important lesson for any company thinking of selling to Google. Remember Dodgeball. Remember Jaiku. Don’t be next.

Anyway, in Jaiku there has grown interesting mixup of both network and community at the same time of researchers, journalists, nerds, designers, consultants and startupers, to name a few architypes. This communal network has no secret greetings and is very loose from its egdes – very easy to join. As the structure of presenting of comments in Twitter and Jaiku are quite different (threads, channels and so) it is impossible to transfer this network to Twit with same intension. We use daily for example crowdsourcing and collective intelligence for innovations and troubleshooting. Many jaikuers are active on thee IRC also.

Naturally Twit has more noise to follow, important to journalists etc. nowadays. On the other hand, quality noise floods to Jaiku also, but filtered already :) I’m not arguing which one is better or more suitable to mankind, but the way of communication – and social bindings etc. – is quite different between Jaiku and Twit and that creates different kind of networks, cohesion of them and ways to handle noise.

I’ve had my Twit account quite long, but for me Twit is more to noise source, like in Mumbai case. I suppose that quite many Finnish jaikuers will stay there to the bitter end :)