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Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter's most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google's technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users. But now we're seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends.

Android is getting its own App Store called the Android Market. It's open source and apparently free to use.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, YouTube is about to focus even more intently on leveraging its homepage for profit by selling large format ads that expand to fill the whole page. The ad unit, expected to come in the following weeks, will start at a price of about $200,000 per day with rates increasing in the Fall.

Why is it that both political campaigns feel the need to have their own social networks. Barack Obama has my.barackobama.com and John McCain has McCainSpace, which just relaunched with a new design from KickApps after failing massively on its own. The new McCainSpace design itself is functional enough, giving McCain supporters a central place to discuss election issues via blogs, forums, videos, and photos. But I'm not sure who the site is supposed to appeal to other than lonely Young Republicans who don't have any friends on Facebook. The site is aimed at "Generation08," presumably the young'uns that the campaign is having a hard time reaching. The logo and default photo image remind me of something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (remember that scene with the alien light coming through the doorway?) And then there's the welcome video of McCain on the homepage (embedded below), saying "Greetings my friends." Greetings, gramps.