Following on from yesterday's question of "is Jaiku dead?" Jyri Engestrom replied both on the Jaiku Blog , but also to some questions over on my blog . The short answer is the integration with Google has been a massive headache, but things are going to start picking up in the near future.

Engestrom's comment, in reply to questions on why the site is slowing down and the posting of a "we really have got new stuff coming up" read as follows:

More specifically, the recent slowdowns are caused by an increase in the the volume of feed data fetched by Jaiku, some of which is spam. We’re cleaning up the database and speeding up the service by doing various operations over the coming week or so. We’ve been keeping quiet while we work on new product development, but we’re in a period where we’ve moved countries and are learning completely new systems at Google, and consequently it takes a while to develop and launch something. I wrote a quick heads-up from the team so you guys know what’s going on even though there’s nothing to announce yet. Thanks for your patience, we appreciate it.

Let's hope so, because Jaiku has a lot of committed users who want to see the service be all it can be.