Three Finnish Jaiku fans have created a service called Twitbear that describes itself as “enabling conversations around tweets”. Antti Akonniemi, CEO of Kisko Labs, Kai Lemmetty, co-founder of Floobs and Helene Auramo, CEO of Zipipop came up with the service after Jaiku had started crashing fairly often after Google announced it would pull the plug from it las January.
The service itself is based around threaded communication and is currently in closed beta. At the moment, it pulls tweets from Twitter and adds the comments to the service itself – enabling the threaded communication that many other services have tried to pull off, inluding Tweetree. In essence it is a microblogging platform that pulls part of its data from Twitter. According to the creators of Twitbear – services like Friendfeed are too manyfold and difficult to use, something that many former Jaiku fans can agree with, I’m sure.
Only a handful of users have received invitations to the service and each registered user is given 5 invitations to share. It’s nice to still see innovation around threaded conversations, something that remains to be tackled with a proper service. Jaiku had a good try at it, but with Google buying the service – development came to a halt. I’ve personally noticed many Finns beginning to use Brightkite, a service similar to Jaiku. It remains to be seen which will be the service that will take off outside Twitterdom – or do we need one?
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
The sentance “Google announced it would pull the plug” implies something that is not true. jaiku is not being shut down.
Antti: isn’t it more like “Twitbear Complements Twitter With Commenting” or “Twitbear Adds Commenting to Twitter”? Twitbear doesn’t seem to be fighting Twitter, quite the opposite – building upon their service.
@darren – it announced that it would not support the development of Jaiku anymore, but let it float online in open source mode. I see that as pulling the plug on active development.
@Vesa – agree to a point, but then again – Twitbear is defying Twitter’s features in my opinion to create something better. At the moment Twitbear requires users to use the service (if you wish to comment) and thus “pulls” users from Twitter with better features to itself.