Acquired in October 2007, Twitter rival Jaiku still doesn't accept new users. Its current ones complain of system slowdowns and malfunctions. On May 30, 2008, founder Jyri Engeström wrote:

Contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too.

Acquired in October 2006, JotSpot is Google Sites now, and according to longtime users, it's not what it used to be.

Purchased in 2005, it took Google six months to assign any new engineers to the project. The founders quit in 2007, and one, Dennis Crowley, will tell any entreprenuer who will listen to reject Google's siren song.

Google acquired GrandCentral, which provides a suite of telephony services, in July 2007, immediately closed it to new users and hasn't opened it since.

Google acquired Measure Map in 2006, hoping to incorporate its features into Google Analytics. "And we did that," reports Google VP David Lawee. Too bad for bloggers who missed Measure Map's blog-specific features and don't use Google's Blogger.

True enough — but it turns out that those businesses, cheaply started and cheaply run, did not need much investment; nor would they return much capital to investors. Morgan, a former coprorate lawyer, was counting on public stock-market investors to show up and play the greater fool, taking his startups off his hands for hundreds of millions of dollars. That was venture capital's business model in the 1990s, when Morgan got into the business. It was the one revival he was really counting on. It never happened. And now he and VCs of his ilk have been revealed as the greatest fools of all.

It's been 16 months since since Google acquired the company from Excite founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. During that time JotSpot languished and users — like me and my coworkers at my old gig — suffered from bugs and poor customer service.

If you like, blame the delay on JotSpot employees wasting their time at Google. After all, Kraus runs OpenSocial, Google PR's answer to what once looked like the runaway success of Facebook's application platform. One former JotSpot employee, Google Sites product manager Scott Johnston, seems to use his 20 percent time sending Twitters.

But more likely the delay is due to limited market demand for a "Sharepoint killer." Microsoft's SharePoint, which lets you post huge PowerPoint presentations to a file server instead of clogging your Exchange box with extra copies, has been doing a good job of killing itself. Do you know anyone who uses SharePoint willingly and gladly, without being strongarmed by a central IT department?

(Photo by ptufts)

And eBayers report that the company didn't send a company-wide e-mail telling employees to shut up about the explosion at PayPal's San Jose headquarters. Still no word on what kind of Sony battery it was.

Sorry, I mean bomb. What kind of bomb it was.

Maybe they wanted the bold-name talent of founder Joe Kraus (also a founder of that dot-com bubble poster child Excite). Maybe Kraus has blackmail on someone in the Google mergers and acquisitions department. Or maybe at Google's level, with $10 billion in cash floating around, the difference between $10 mil and $50 mil isn't worth picking over.

Earlier: Google buys JotSpot [Valleywag]

• Behind the deal, volume VI: Billionaire Mark Cuban shares some hearsay about Google's purchase of YouTube. For instance, a whole $500 million of YouTube's $1.65 billion windfall allegedly went in escrow to potentially pay for copyright lawsuits, and Google organized a legal squeeze on YouTube's competitors while the video site cut deals with music and movie companies. [Blog Maverick]
• Know how wiki site SocialText congratulated competitor JotSpot for selling itself to Google? Now SocialText is handing out free services to user migrating from JotSpot. SocialText founder Ross Mayfield may look like a pretty boy, but he plays dirty. [SocialText]
• Today in "I can't believe they're serious": The startup "Hobeez" — a social site based on hobbies, not hobos — couldn't look worse if it was built by a blind first-grader during recess. Its logo was designed with the satirical Web 2.0 Logo Creator. And yet its founders are e-mailing pitches to bloggers. [Hobeez]

The irrepressible John Gotts, who bought the Wiki.com domain for $3 million in August (Valleywag profile here), tells me, "This will certainly make Wiki.com more valuable and make more people aware of wikis in general." (He then spent six paragraphs bragging about the success of Wiki.com — which will end up costing just shy of $4 million — and his other properties.)

Ross Mayfield, founder of JotSpot competitor SocialText, congratulated JotSpot on his blog, saying, "It has been great competing with you." Blogger Paul Kedrosky notes to me that Ross only takes three sentences to call this buyout "another great validation" of collaborative wiki services.

So for now, the major impact of the JotSpot buyout is free airtime for its competitors.

While the price is a mystery, one blogger says any price is a great payoff for the founders' $100,000 investment. But after launching its product, the company took $5.2 million in VC funding in 2004.

We're Googlers now [JotSpot blog]