Jaiku rises from the dead, but is it too late?

The Google owned microblogging service Jaiku is back after an extended weekend outage, and a year of epic fails on the social side, having blocked new signups since it was acquired.

There’s no dramatic change evident on the site, although there was reports that Jaiku was switching to Google Gears. The noticeable difference is that new users are able to sign up to Jaiku via unlimited invites from existing users, but it’s not exactly open and free yet.

Jaiku showed a lot of promise early on, often billed as Twitter’s chief competitor, but is now cited as yet another example of how Google kills acquisitions, particularly when the buy was IP related as opposed to user base. Jaiku today still has many of its original appealing features: the ability to life stream content, nice interface and a multimedia environment, but what was great before is now nearly commonplace is a sea of Twitter wannabes.

(via VentureBeat)