Jaiku: competition for Twitter
Jaiku = Twitter + a little bit of geo-information + iconography + mobile client (currently S60, Nokia only).
cool: after signing up, Jaiku checks several IM-services (GTalk/Gmail, Hotmail, Jabber) for other existing Jaiku-users you’re already connected to. Jaiku also allows easy integration of existing blog-feeds. on the downside, I wasn’t able to find a feature for directly messaging a single user. other than that, it’s really very similar to Twitter. according to this post by Robert Scoble, they’re even dealing with the same load-problems (I experienced quite some delay when posting via my mobile, which btw. involves an SMS-gateway in finland, where Jaiku was created).
update: 606Tech features an interview with Jaiku-founder Jyri Engeström.
[...] SMS-notification nor -message-posting - and is therefor lacking the killer-feature of Twitter, Jaiku & Co. on the sunny side of life, Pownce offers broad support of microformats (both for posted [...]