Remember Jaiku? That service which was launched in 2007 which aimed to be a Twitter like service except that it was more of a content aggregator than anything else. Using Jaiku, users can type in 140 character messages as updates while also having conetent aggregated from other services they are apart of through parsing RSS feeds.

As it turns out, Jaiku is still around. In a blog post published on the official Jaiku blog on May 30th, Jyri reminded folks that Jaiku is still alive and well and that moving the service into the Google App Engine has taken much longer than anticipated. Jyri also mentioned that they do in fact have plans for future development. What that future development might be is anyone’s guess.

What I find interesting is that, this service called FriendFeed has ate Jaiku for lunch and then spit them out. FriendFeed works in a very similar fashion to Jaiku except there are no 140 character limits and the content aggregation looks much prettier on FriendFeed. Also, there appears to be much more conversation surrounding the aggerated content items on FriendFeed than there is on Jaiku.

So although Jaiku was one of the first services out of the gate to allow aggregation of your content into a central location allowing others to comment on those items, either their timing was wrong for the service or they had a few things wrong with their implementation. If that was the case, I don’t know what those wrong items might of been. The bottom line is, Jaiku was the first major player in this arena and once Google acquired them, they have fallen flat on their faces. Also, I find it funny that the people behind the FriendFeed service are ex Google employees. Isn’t that quite the coincidence?

The bottom line is, FriendFeed is the place to be in terms of content aggregation in a central location. The early adopters along with many of the big names within the blogosphere are climbing all over each other on the service which is usually a good sign that the service is worthy of your time. Jaiku on the other hand is still invite only which doesn’t appear to be doing them any good.

I don’t see Jaiku ever becoming a threat to FriendFeed. FriendFeed has picked up where Jaiku has left off, improved upon their offerings and apparently, they have done everything right. There is no looking back for FriendFeed and if I were the creators of Jaiku, I’d be thanking my lucky stars that I was acquired before the launch of FriendFeed.

One last thing before I go. I wanted to highlight the fact that it would seem as though being the first one out of the gate does not guarantee anything. I strongly believe that the Google acquisition has done nothing but set Jaiku back but hey, at least Jryi and company received a nice paycheck.