Twitter is winning and most of its competitors remain in denial. In spite of almost 5 months of unavailability of its most viral service, Twitter remains the platform of choice for most users. FriendFeed remains a hybrid of conversations and semi-realtime aggregator, capturing most of the energy of Google Reader as a citation engine but stubbornly refusing to allow its metadata to flow back into Twitter and other real time engines.

Facebook has freshened up its UI and allowed us to personalize the news stream to vaguely emulate Twitter. And Jaiku appears to have made the leap to App Engine and could resurface momentarily, only to remind us why Twitter won that one in the first place. Jaiku was always the erector set that could do anything, but who has the time to do anything these days? Better to do what we can do, and let the winners expand their offerings.