Jaiku is Twitter’s eternal competition. As you know it was bought by google in October 2007. I always preferred the latter one and I still insist it is better quality, but Twitter has a share of the grand mass, "developments community" and most of all your contacts. These days Google is releasing ballast(my stocks are going up the creek) and, amongst other services, of which we will also speak, Jaiku will close. It’s a half closure, in reality it will close as a service but will enable the latest version in open code for the community. It literally is the “latest version” , because they wont improve or update it, that is up to the developers that wish to so and I think they will, without a shadow of a doubt. When this happens I bet this will be the best  self hosted microblogging platform. This news leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth, its great for the freedom but bad for the closure of the service. I’m sure you will agree with me that Google could have done more for Jaiku. The purchase reminds me of the domain purchases I sometimes do,  following an entrepreneurial impulse that diminishes as time passes. With the financial clout they ...

Pownce is a microblogging service that will close on December 15th. This was announced on their blog and those of us who have a user account have received an e-mail with the news. Pownce was launched as a private beta in June 2007 with an excellent backer, Kevin Rose, creator of the social aggregator Digg and Revision3, who created the company Megatechtronium together with a team of developers. During the private beta, a great deal of expectation was created as it was seen as a potential Twitter killer. Invitations to try it were even sold on eBay. At the beginning of this year, it was opened to the public. By that date, Jaiku and Twitter already existed. Pownce came to the microblogging market with the functionality of both, and expanded it. It allowed messages with more than 140 characters to be sent, as well as files with images, videos or songs. It launched with two interfaces, the web-based one and another one based on an Adobe AIR desktop application. Another important difference from its competitors was that, from the beginning, it had a business model. This had two aspects: contextual advertising and premium accounts, which allowed additional features like sending larger files, access to ...