Attention: Jaiku is not dead. The Twitter competitor Google bought up is still alive…and still in limited beta. Supposedly they’re working on a new backend so Jaiku invites are still hard to come by unless of course you’ve visited jaikuinvites.com.

From their About Us page:

“Jaiku Invites is the place to come for all the latest news on Jaiku as well as the best place to share those precious invites!”

Ahem. What about the official Jaiku blog? But being the curious webmonkey that I am, I signed up the site and got an invite not two days later. Yes, I snagged my very own erna.jaiku.com. To all the other Ernas out there, sorry.

The people behind the site are Weeno Media, founded by Ciarán Rooney and Paul Flood. It’s certainly an easy enough concept to understand. If you want a Jaiku invite, click on the Jaiku Invite button and anyone with a spare invite will email you with the code. Once you have invites of your very own, you can share them with the Jaiku-deprived of which I am no longer a member.

It certainly seems to be working because when I requested an invite on the official Jaiku site, I didn’t get anything besides the automated ‘thank you for wanting to visit our treehouse. Sorry it’s a little full right now but we’ll get back to you’.

This is slightly reminiscent of the time when Gmail invites was a precious and rare commodity with them being snapped up in a matter of seconds. Now that everyone’s got a Gmail account, what do you do with said invites? Invite yourself to make a few dozen different email accounts, I suppose.

Impressions of Jaiku? Well, it didn’t help the very next day after I signed up it was down. For almost a whole day. But otherwise, it’s got an excellent S60 application, has a far better-looking Flash rendition than Twitter, is less customizable sadly and being able to include other Web feeds in the Jaiku lifestream is certainly a bonus.

For those already on twhirl, the neat Adobe Air application to update Twitter, the new version of twhirl allows simultaneous updates of Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce in one go. First, you need to download the Adobe Air platform (only about 11MB) and then the less than 1MB twhirl app.  It’s not a tax on resources, works quickly and is certainly a better bet than manual updates of three different services.

For other invites to other platforms, go visit inviteshare.com, another place to get in on the many interesting Web 2.0 apps still in beta. Both jaikuinvites.com and inviteshare.com were highlighted on Lifehacker.com, which was where I got the leads to the site. So join up and pass the beta invites on!

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 5:32 am under Web2.0.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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