jaiku the microblogging platform that was bought by Google last year has popped back up on the radar.

Since the acquisition, Jaiku was pretty much mothballed - an unfortunate turn of events for the Euro answer to Twitter that has seen it's growth stunted. New users couldn't sign up, so whilst Twitter exploded, Jaiku fell further back.

But, Jaiku has/had some great functionality that made it a great alternative to Twitter - back channels, threaded comments, a usable mobile app to name three that promised much.

In the intervening few months, Twitter has seen it's user base expand rapidly but its service crumble as they struggle to scale under the weight of such rapid expansion.

So, will Google kick Twitter when it's down (they have a lot of opportunities coming up I'm sure) and put the resources behind Jaiku to become a serious competitor? You'd like to think that Jaiku's move to the Google App Engine will ensure that they won't have anything like the scaling problems that Twitter have had, at least technically.

But the major question is whether they can gain ground on Twitter in terms of user numbers. Services like Twitter are only as useful as the people you know/follow on them, else they seem lonely and pointless.

Even though gaining new users will be one of, if not the most important task for Jaiku in the coming weeks/months, you still can't sign up for the service directly. You need to know an existing Jaiku-er...so if you want to try it out, let me know and I'll send one over to you.

-pc.