When we last talked to him in May, Engeström seemed to be enjoying what he was working on at Google. And as he told us in January, “We’re not dying, we’re morphing,” after Google decided to cease internal development of Jaiku. Rather than killing off Jaiku completely, like it did with Dodgeball and others, Google decided to allow Jaiku to be ported over to App Engine, and open-sourced. Sadly, still not much has come of that. And now, it’s unclear how much Engeström will have to do with the project from this point on.

The reason is that he’s moving on to other things. As he notes in his tweet, he’s aiming to do something that “makes meaning,” borrowing from something Guy Kawasaki says in one of his books. We know a little bit about what that will be.

First and foremost, we hear Engeström had a strong desire to move back to his native Finland. Following the Google acquisition of Jaiku, Engeström and his family moved to San Francisco to work at the Googleplex. While here, he did manage to make connections that seem to point us in the direction of what he’ll be doing next.

One of those connections is Chris Messina, an important figure in the open web development community. Word is that Engeström and Messina are working on something around the term “social objects,” which Engeström coined. This will likely have something to do with Activitystrea.ms, another project Messina is working on, we hear.

Another project that will likely take up some of Engeström’s time is helping his wife with her new startup, Thinglink. The service’s landing page (it’s in closed beta) describes it as “a way to share design collections and photos.”

Both of those things seems like they may be more of projects though, than startups. So you can probably look for Engeström to try his hand at another one of those soon as well. It seems likely that upon his return to Finland, Engeström may also do some angel investing of his own.

Most recently, Engeström gave an interesting presentation with some thoughts on social elements. I’ve embedded it below.

As for Google, their legacy of acquiring startups in a hot space, only to run them into the ground and lose their founders, continues. At least they got a solid two years out of Engeström.

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The micro-sharing application was launched the same year in private beta and became somewhat of a competitor to Twitter (which was nowhere near as popular as it is nowadays) and Pownce (which never really took off and was ultimately put out of its misery by Six Apart). Jaiku was famously acquired by Google at the end of 2007 before it hit mainstream success and has since often been cited as one of the search engine company’s infamous zombie acquisitions, with little or no further development happening on the service since the takeover and the original founders moving on to doing other things on the company’s payroll.

Then Google discontinued a number of services in the beginning of this year, and Jaiku was widely reported to be one of the axed products, but Engeström swiftly responded to those reports with a blog post saying that Jaiku wasn’t dying but instead morphing (into an open-source platform for building micro-publishing services on Google App Engine).

Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are.

(sorry about the occasional sound glitches)

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What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right now about any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

Whether you want to know how people are mentally gearing up for this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or what they are thinking about today’s Ireland vs. Italy rugby match, searching Twitter will give you a pretty good smattering of sentiment and opinion. It is also a lot faster at getting out the essential details about breaking news, such as the Mumbai attacks or the plane that landed on the Hudson.

Twitter’s search engine is powered by Summize, a startup it acquired last July. But it also developed a feature called Track, currently disabled but coming back soon, that allowed people to follow the mention of specified keywords. John Borthwick, an investor in Summize (and thus now an investor in Twitter), explained in a blog post earlier this month ago why he thinks that “Twitter search changes everything.” Excerpt:

Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.

. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,” “Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.

Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:

If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.

Doing that would require Google to “affirm Twitter’s dominance in this category and the importance of the Twitter data stream,” contends Borthwick. But so far, Google has pretty much flubbed this opportunity to open up real-time search. It bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, only to shut it down. And now it is hoping to create a counterweight to Twitter’s growing strength in real-time data by open-sourcing Jaiku. Good luck with that one.

Listening to Twitter’s investors gives a good sense of how they think Twitter can become a game-changer in real-time search. While it is instructive, it is also important to note that much of this vision has yet to materialize. Twitter’s current search is extremely crude, as Borthwick readily admits. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. There is no ranking or clustering beyond that.

An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.

(Photo by Patrick Boury).

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Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström responded to the reports today in a blog post claiming that the service – which has always remained invite-only ever since its launch even after Google’s acquisition in 2007 – is actually going to serve for something more interesting than he set it out to be, and I think he’s got a point. As we wrote before, Jaiku will be ported to Google App Engine (something which had already been initiated months ago) and all of its code will be released under the Apache license, while existing accounts will still be able to use the tool the same way they’ve been able to ever since it launched.

But few people seem to care that handing out the code to the open source community and starting the ‘Jaiku Engine’ project is actually great news for companies, groups and individuals who were looking to roll their own, decentralized microsharing / lifestreaming applications, initiatives we’ve seen pop up here and there already (e.g. Laconica / identi.ca, which just received seed funding and Yonkly). For better or worse, the Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, something Twitter users and developers have been desperately asking the San Francisco startup to add preferably sooner than later. I’m quite sure this will prove more interesting in the long run than what most people expected Jaiku’s future to hold.

So Google did not acquire Jaiku in order to launch a Twitter competitor, but does that matter?

In Jyri’s words:

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

Let’s wait and see, but I for one am curious to find out.

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Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter’s most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google’s technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.

But now we’re seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends.

The new data center isn’t Jaiku’s final resting place, merely a step towards running things on Google App Engine. However, it’s an important one for a company that appears to be preparing itself first and foremost for scalability (a problem that notoriously has plagued Twitter).

As VentureBeat points out, Jaiku has also introduced a new terms of service and privacy policy, so it’s getting its legal house in order as well.

Are you a Jaiku member? Share some of your unlimited invitations with outsiders over at InviteShare.

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So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter. Another feature I like is the fact that you tell it where you are, so location information is included.

Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application. The application automatically adds location information to your photos and updates.

Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos – see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well – which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi.

Update: I’m actually going to re-jailbreak my iphone to test the software – the fact that uploading is so easy and it adds location information is worth noting. If it works really well, this could actually be a reason for me to stop posting directly to Twitter.

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Is making a phone call easier than thumbing an SMS? Depends what kind of phone you have and what kind of person you are. But the Dictaphone is now social. This will appeal at least to all those people who like to record their notes into a mini tape recorder. They can share those thoughts with the world, and computers will transcribe them.

As far as I can see from a quick perusal of SpinVox’s Website, its service is only available in Europe, and it is not free. But it is an obvious solution to the mobile user-interface problem. The best input technology for a mobile phone is speaking into it. Maybe competitors SimulScribe, Jott, or Yap will step up to the plate in the U.S.

Wait, there is already a way to turn a phone into a microphone for any Web application. It is called the MyVox API from VoodoVox. It is ad-supported so it is free. And the best app built on the API can win $25,000.

Hat tip to our man in Spain, Crunchgear’s John Biggs, who alerted me to the SpinVox announcement, and discovered these weird blockhead dolls at its booth at MWS:

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Tweets relating to Super Tuesday are overlaid on a Google Map, along with other data including YouChoose ‘08 videos, Google News election headlines and primary state results. The site is live here. Google is also offering gadgets with the results as they come in.

Google has tracked big events before in a similar fashion to this, but what’s different here is the tie-in with Twitter. Google acquired Twitter rival Jaiku in October, and we haven’t heard much about Jaiku since, aside from some intermittent reports that the service was stagnating under Google and that users were switching to Twitter. Could this new deal be a recognition by Google that Twitter is where it’s at, its $100 million buy of Jaiku aside? Or was Jaiku simply another tech buy that will be merged into Android and cease to be a Twitter competitor? (Jaiku had a strong mobile platform on top of being simply a Twitter clone.)

Lets hope that either Twitter’s new hosting Verio can handle the traffic, or Google has lent Twitter some server space, otherwise by about 9-10pm EST tonight as solid results start coming through, the only thing we might see on the mashup is an error message similar to the one top right in this post.

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According to Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg, the new service is way for users to share short messages with a corporate structure, or with private messaging between different groups. Mullenweg says that although it’s not initially aimed at becoming a distributed Twitter, they are offering the template on an open source basis and that if people want to hack it for this purpose, “you’re welcome to.”

The concept of a distributed Twitter has been discussed in certain circles for the better part of the last year. The concept is to decentralize a short message service, therefore overcoming the constant issues Twitter has with service provision, or in simple terms, many people host the service across many servers, and they all talk to one and other.

Allen Stern at Centernetworks says that “With Wordpress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.” Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but the key to Twitter’s success has been three fold. One is its sheer volume of users that has seen it defeat competitors such as Jaiku by providing the most active and rich user base. Secondly although the centralized service is a weakness, it’s also a strength because when you connect to others on Twitter, you connect to others on Twitter. No working out whether the server they’re on is up-to-date, live or even compatible, it just works (when it’s not down, or “temporarily overloaded”). Third is the open access to Twitter via third party tools; just ask Leah Culver from Pownce (who’s not one of my fans) about why open access is vital in building something like this. Prologue may provide some open access, but its distributed nature will mean that ultimately it will be a niche product; possibly a good niche product, but it’s not going to knock the Twitter bird off its perch any time soon.

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Jaiku Founders Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen today posted this on their homepage:

“While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.”

The terms of the acquisition have not been released.

This is a fascinating move by Google which would have looked at Twitter prior to this acquisition, and Twitter’s recent $5 million series A funding last July.

There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now.

More coverage on TechCrunch UK.

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The new feature will allow Jaiku users using Jaiku’s Web, iPhone, and Nokia Series 60 smart phone clients to communicate with users on Jabber-based IM networks including Google Talk. Functionality includes the ability to instantly add and read new posts, comments, channel messages, and receive notifications of inbound responses directly.

Jaiku already provides a number of extra features that are not currently available on the more popular (and it’s main competitor) Twitter. Jaiku users can choose and receive web feeds from their friends online activities, for example, Flickr photos, updates from specific blogs, Last.fm recently played tracks and others.

To use the service, Jaiku users should add jaiku@jaiku.com to their respective Jabber-based IM client.

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TwitKu is a new site that is sort of a Meebo (web instant messaging) for the Twitter and Jaiku “presence blogging” services.

The site brings your Twitter and Jaiku accounts onto one screen and adds a posting interface that allows you to post just to one of the services, or to both. The benefit for many people that use both services religiously is obvious. Very simple and very useful for some people.

Both Twitter and Jaiku have APIs, making this possible (or at least manageable). Clones/similar products like Pownce and the new Yappd don’t have APIs. When and if those services release them, I’d expect TwitKu to quickly add those services as well. And that would save those of us who want to use all of the services but refuse to choose a lot of time.

And since Twitter and Jaiku are all about presence and status updates of friends, there’s no reason not to add Facebook status right away, too.

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Twitter, which launched a year ago, was obviously used as the initial inspiration for the Pownce. They both allow users to sign up, add friends, and broadcast quick notes to people. The main differences: Twitter is mobile-ready, allowing users to receive friend requests and new messages via text message. And Pownce gives users more flexibility in communicating by allowing messages just to friends. Pownce also allows different kinds of messages – file transfers, events, links and plain text messages (Twitter allows text and links only). There’s no reason, though, that users will use both. They’ll go with one or the other, or neither.

So is Pownce good enough to beat Twitter?

The early adopter crowd is going to be torn on this one. (Just about) everyone loves Kevin Rose, and anything he launches is going to get serious attention – on Digg, tech blogs and mainstream press. But a lot of people like Twitter, too, and that application has already reached the “network effect” stage of its business cycle. It continues to grow fast. And Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter (and Odeo and Blogger), is also well liked in Silicon Valley.

A breakdown of the basic features is in the chart to the right. Pownce also provides a few other bells and whistles not included in the chart. For example, it lets you forward a message to others (and also allows you to exclude those that have already received it). And they also give basic stats on messages, like how many people have received it. Pownce has an AIR desktop application, although there are similar apps for Twitter, too. Another thing to consider that’s not on the chart – Twitter has had, and continues to have, massive performance issues. It is slow or down way too often.

Services like Twitter and Pownce (and there are others, too – Jaiku, Kyte and many more) are highly viral and benefit from the network effect. People want to join the service that all of their friends already use, and so each new user adds value to the network as a whole. By that measure, Twitter is far ahead of Pownce.

Frankly, unless you really like the mobile aspect of Twitter, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two services. I expect Twitter will add most of the Pownce features in the short term anyway. And many of the unique features of Pownce – like file sharing, group messaging, etc., are handled pretty well already by…email. Gmail, for example, lets users send files of up to 20 MB. Pownce lets you send up to 10 MB files, unless you pay for a pro account (then the limit is 100 MB). And email is certainly very useful for private and group messaging.

People use Twitter to quickly tell the world (or at least the people who care) what they are up to and what they are looking at on the web. Like blogging, it’s a one-to-many application that works very well. Twitter does that perfectly, and does little else. Pownce does it, too, but all the other features are really just distractions.

Pownce also does something that I find highly annoying. By default, you receive an email message every time you get a new friend or receive any sort of message. My inbox quickly filled up with dozens of emails telling me I had a message. But to read the message I have to click on a link and go to the service. The only reason for that is to generate page views. It’s easy to turn the notifications off, but most new users will start to get a lot of email clogging their inbox. Not a good way to start things off.

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