Jaiku has found its way back online, now hosted at the Google datacenters, but not within the Google Apps Engine as was rumored. From the official blog post:

We’ve now moved Jaiku to a Google data center. This is something that we’d planned to do anyway, as part of our future transition to Google App Engine.

Jaiku is still running its original engine, however, there are some news, like a new TOS and unlimited invites. I didn’t know they were scarce?

Jaiku is down right now, but it might be a good thing that it is. Jaiku Invites blog reports that Google is moving the microblogging service that could have been a serious Twitter contender to the Google Apps cloud setup. This could mean a number of thing, one being that we’ll soon be able to get internal Jaiku-ish communication within Google Apps, but the most prominent result of this should be better uptime.

It is my opinion that Jaiku could’ve taken its share of users from Twitter, as well as given other social web sites and app a run for its money, with its very lifestreamish take on microblogging. However, the site never got the push it needed, and it feel marginalized to me. Fun fact though: In Sweden, where I live, Jaiku is the microblogging site.

Twitter wants us to know that they are trying to fight the spam hitting them. In a blog post, they outline how they combat spam, highlighting three different areas:

• Suspended Accounts which is really a better internal admin tool
• Community Powered Alerts which is really better analyzing of spam blocking by users
• Dedicated Personnel which is hiring more people to manage the spam problem

Sure, the explanations above might be my interpretation, but I believe it pretty much sums it up. This is all well and good, but what calms me the most (had I been upset, that is), is how Biz Stone wraps up the post:

There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away. Spammers will keep finding inventive new ways to advance their motives and harm user experience and we’ll keep shutting them down and slowing their progress. We just wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are taking spam seriously.

Thanks for not bullshitting us, Biz! To be completely honest, spam isn’t such an issue for me (on Twitter). Then again, I’m not re-following everyone following, so I’m probably not that easy to get to for the spammers.

Pownce wants you to share your location with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo service that just recently got integrated with Pownce. Fire Eagle is a geotagging service, so your content will be tagged with the location. Give it a go if you will, you’ll need to be logged in to get started though.

On a different note, Pownce gives every pro user who signed up during the first year another 3 months for free, as a thank you. Fair enough, but I still feel that the feature boost for non-paying users is more of an issue, and I won’t be going pro again when my subscription runs out, there is just no incentive to convince me otherwise.

Michael Arrington calls for a Fake Follow feature on Twitter, and similar on FriendFeed for that matter, so that he can stroke people’s egos. What? I actually makes sense:

[...] there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

I’ve had some of those myself, and I think Arrington i pretty spot on with the need for a less friendly follow on Twitter. It just becomes too much to handle, both for yourself and, I suspect, for Twitter when you’ve got 300+ followers. Or wherever, it probably depends on who you follow too. The story notes that Twitter “might” adopt something like this, and FriendFeed’s got features coming out to cope with it.

As we explore our blogs and clean out the clutter in this ongoing series on WTF Blog Design Clutter, we’ve looked at the pros and cons of blog clutter with too many “friend” pictures and badges, calendar archives, and most recent comments and shout boxes. Remember that clutter is in the eye of the beholder - the visiting user - not necessarily the blogger. What we see when we visit and use our blogs is not necessarily what the visitor and return reader see or experience. We need to explore our blog’s design through their eyes to help them use and read our blogs.

The usability factor in web design is critical. We often add design elements (widgets and gadgets specifically) to our blog for fun or novelty. We’re flush with the excitement of the latest and hottest whizzbang goodie and we want to share the fun on our blogs. If your blog is getting cluttered with a lot of WordPress Plugins, Widgets, Gadgets, Scripts, and whizzbangs, maybe it’s time to analyze these design elements to find out which ones are most important to your blog and its users - and which one are just clutter.

Today, I want to explore the pros and cons of microblog clutter on your blogs. Are you microblogging?
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Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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Twitter experienced an unplanned outage, and is down and out for maintenance. They are using this outage to upgrade the affected database, according to a blog post. The service is still down, but hopefully we’ll be getting our microblogging cravings satisfied soon.

Speaking of Twitter, they have apparently tested a new design on select users. SheGeeks and TechCrunch have got screenshots.

Microblogging service Pownce have updated their Pownce Desktop app to 2.0, which means you’ll get embedded media, notification alerts, friend management, and more. Pownce Desktop 2.0 is in alpha, and free to download.

The Pownce developers have also made an iPhone and iPod touch version available from the iTunes App store. Free, of course.

Blogging relies on technology which is sure to change at a rapid pace. A recent development is “microblogging.”

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