If Twitter were down for one, two, or even three consecutive days, would you crack? For the heaviest, most avid of users, I think yes. But when the microblogging service Jaiku, acquired some 9-10 months ago by Google, told its users to take a weekend breather the past couple of days, few in the blog world raised the issue. Zach Epstein at the Boy Genius Report jumped on it, made a quick joke. But other than he, there seems to be little in the way of OMGs, WTFs, and various other three- and four-letter caps-sized exclamations.

However, having looked at responses by Jaiku Invites and ZDNet’s Googling Google blogger Garett Rogers, it appears that the service isn’t quite “down for the count,” so to speak. Instead, there’s morsel-sized evidence Jaiku is taking this short hiatus to enact a real shift in performance to give Jaiku that extra umph on the Google App Engine people have anticipated for a number of weeks now.

Indeed, the company did mention earlier this month that it was moving its wares over to the App Engine, and it delivered a few words on the Jaikido Blog about the effort to port the thing as it was underway. But this new memo asking everyone - users, visitors, woops-wrong-turners - to take a breather may well bring about that gleeful and long-awaited phew-ahhh troubled members have been waiting for. Otherwise, it’s just, you know, a few days of downtime. Which even on the Twitter barometer circa Q1 and Q2 2008, would connote doom, gloom, and nasty scarring to boot.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Jaiku Releases New Microblogging Tool for Nokia S60Jaiku on Your iPhoneA Day Without Jaiku…WidSets to Launch Jaiku WidgetJaiku Hosting Markku’s Channel for Eurovision 2007Will Google Use Jaiku to Collect Data on You?Jaiku’s New Mobile App to be Unveiled at Supernova

Source:Mashable!

The Russian search giant Yandex, a site of multi-purpose design, has made quite a bit of news as of late. Eight years of growth has allow its revenue to increase from about $400,000 to a reported $167 million in 2007. And as we let known earlier this year, the company, currently comprised of some 1,200 employees, plans to introduce itself on the NASDAQ stock exchange this autumn.

The most recent profile of the company comes from the Times of London, which seems to peg it squarely against Google. In short, Times reporter Mark Franchetti, with Yandex co-founder and chief executive Arkady Volozh taking to the spotlight, paints the company as a serious challenge to the Mountain View, CA-based Web giant on the Eurasian landscape. For one, it commandeers 55% of the Russian market. Google, on the other hand, holds 21%.

The challenges posed by both forces are in fact quite interesting to observe at present. Google just last month purchased a Russian contextual ad firm by the name of Begun, formerly a Rambler Media property, for $140 million. Presumably it was in order to capitalize on solid growth in Russia’s Internet sector as well as invest in a greater percentage of the search pie in the region. At least while the taking is still good, anyway. Though Google holds a portion less than half the size of Yandex, its position is not so firmly set in place as it is in more Western reaches of the world.

Of course, Yandex recognizes this fact, and so it is wasting no time to push hard for its own growth. That goes as much for the Russian market as places outside its border. It was said just this week that Yandex has significantly upgraded its data connections to Ukraine. And earlier still, it make it a point to mention upgrades to its search engine to support so-called world standards and enhance users’ access to video to better compete with the ever-advancing Google.

Yet the growth of Yandex may not impact Google world ranking as much as some, like the Times, have intimated. 33 million Russian citizens are said to be using the Web. That number is expected to nearly double in five years’ time. A sizable figure, for sure. Looking at recent estimates of Russia’s total population, however, which sits at around 142 million, down from a purported 145 million in 2002, the penetration rate of Web services does not nearly match that of Western audiences. The U.S., for example, home to some 300 million people, is over 70% connected, with an estimated 219 million users. Europe as a whole sits just shy of the 50% mark. Germany, Norway, UK, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden, all show rates similar to that of the US. France is about 55%.

That said, there’s no question Yandex is capitalizing fully on Russia’s measured ascent in Internet development. According to Quintura, a search company itself, Yandex has become something of a household name in its home state, and in so doing intends to go so far as to refresh its logo to an entirely Cyrillic designation, rather than the largely English-language label it has maintained.

Semantics aside, it is becoming increasingly evident that what was for a number of years a very Western-influenced Internet marketplace has internationalized greatly, to the point that actors in China (Baidu, et al.) and, to somewhat lesser degree, Russia, have achieved heavyweight or near-heavyweight status. That goes for search as well as social networking service, video channels, and Web software. And it’s perhaps safe to say that current trends will continue. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that Google will hurt as a result. Virtually all large markets around the world have considerable room left to expand. Only, those of China and Russia have more fresh terrain from which to sow financial largesse, so to speak.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Report: Russian Search Leader Yandex Set for Massive IPOLast.fm Coming to Moscow through Partnership with LiveJournalYouTube Mobile, Yandex, Orkut Polls, Amazon PPA, FunMobility, Motorola, MobilePlay, The Onion, Jott, CongooGoogle Answers to Make Triumphant Return?Odnoklassniki.ru Set To Top $30 Million In RevenueMySpace Speaking Portuguese, Russian, Polish and MoreGoogle: Vulnerable After All?

Quintura is reporting that the founder of Metalloinvest holding and owner of Kommersant publishing house, Alisher Usmanov is seeking a 10-20% stake in Russian search engine Yandex. Based on the current valuation for Yandex of $5 billion, this puts Usmanov’s stake at up to $1 billion.

Usmanov and his companies have minority stakes in the holding companies for mail.ru and Live Journal. This type of deal could put Usmanov into a strong position with the largest Russian mail provider and the largest Russian search engine. In case you were wondering, Yandex currently has 54% market share in Russian search while Google is at 19%.

Check out our exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich to learn more about the largest search engine in Russia.

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Russian leader in search Yandex has announced plans to acquire SMIlink, a provider of traffic services. Yakov over at Quintura has the details on the acquisition. Note that SMIlink’s traffic services are not Web traffic-based but rather actual traffic out in the streets of Russia.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. SMIlink has a staff of about 70.

Check out our in-depth interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich. Yandex was also rated one of the top 10 Web sites in Russia by GOAL.

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Russian consulting firm GOAL is out today with a new report that shows the top Web sites in Russia. The report is a great read if you are interested in learning more about Russia and its Web economy. There’s also a discussion of international players in Russia which includes Google, YouTube, LiveJournal, RapidShare and Yahoo.

The report includes the following categories: Social networks, blogs, photos, videos, news, dating, Q&A, bookmarking, music, citations, search engines and RSS, file storage, wish lists and start pages.

There’s only one issue with the report. They used Alexa as their sole basis of measurement to rank the sites. While that basically makes the actual numbers very suspect, I’d still recommend reading the site for the information provided about each site.  You can download the entire report here (it’s free).

Here are their Top 10 Russian Web Sites (remember that the list is generated by Alexa rankings):

Vkontakte.ru – a successful clone of Facebook. Vkontakte is the most visited site in Russia. It has over 13 million registered users.

Mail.ru is Russia’s leading mail portal, which has grown to include many other social networking features.

Yandex.ru is Russia’s leading search engine, with additional services including email, news etc. The search engine is optimised for the morphology of Russian language.

Odnoklassniki.ru has been sweeping Russia by storm. It is a simple tool to find schoolmates. Odnoklassniki is the fourth most visited site and has 18 million registered users.

Rambler.ru is another very successful search engine. It offers services such as photo and video sharing, dating and games. It owns Russia’s most popular messenger / VoIP phone system ICQ.

LiveInternet.ru is Russia’s leading website of personal blogs, but in reality it combines various online services including web mail, dating and file sharing.

LiveJournal.ru, the US blogging site, has become a phenomenon in Russia, forming the most lively uncensored information portal. From journalists and government critics to pop singers and comedians, many well known personalities share their views on current events.

Loveplanet.ru is Russia’s leading dating website, which claims to have 11 million registered users.

Smotri.ru is Russian analog of YouTube, and despite rated by Alexa at the place number 36, has shown the highest level of visits amongst the independent video sharing sites with the exception of YouTube itself.

Diary.ru is a blogging site, which allows its users to form communities.

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Yakov at Quintura has a post today discussing Russian search engine Yandex and their expansion outside of the Russian language. Currently Yandex returns 90% Russian domain results (.ru) and 10% other results which include the .com domain. Yakov also notes that 15% of its searches are in a language other than Russian and that Yandex could capture that revenue by allowing more non-Russian searches to take place.

I am wondering if we will see local search engines outside the U.S. enter the U.S. market by going after the U.S. markets where a specific language is spoken. For example, in parts of Brooklyn, Russian is the most popular language. Should Yandex market to this demographic? What about Spanish? Or French, German, Japanese, etc.

While this would be a niche market to target, it could broaden the take rate for these search engines which operate outside the U.S. And these marketing opportunities could push past just search into mail, video, news, etc. Check out my exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich for more information about how Yandex works and their business model.

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Today I had the opportunity to meet the CTO of Russian search engine Yandex, Ilya Segalovich. Of the 100+ interviews I’ve conducted for CN, this was one of my favorites - mostly learning about the differences between the U.S. and Russia in views on technology. It’s hard to call Yandex a search engine anymore - they are a leader in many of the Web categories in Russia including mail, search, news, photo hosting, shopping, etc. Here are my notes from our discussion.

Yandex officially launched in 1997 as a way to se