Thanks for a detailed response. A couple of quick questions
Is there any plan to support the twitter API for now so there is no need for an separate client?
Is there a timeframe for support for XMPP & federation? They seem a while away.
To us federation is not as important as XMPP.
Also Are there any migration tools available? Just in case things don't pan out well.
We don't have any current plans to support the Twitter API. That's just because no-one's asked for it. We'd have no objections if someone filed a feature request on our issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/issues/list or sent us a patch to add Twitter API support.
We also have our own API which is supported by a few apps.
Open sourcing the XMPP support is dependent on the AppEngine team's release of the XMPP API. However their roadmap: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html says they'll be launching XMPP support sometime before the end of June 2009.
We don't currently have any migration tools although the JaikuEngine API exposes the complete history of every post a user has made and so does the website. It should be relatively simple for a user extract all of their data out of any JaikuEngine instance. We'd like to make this even easier but we're still thinking about the most user-friendly way to do this.
In general my advice is that you sign up to both Identi.ca and Jaiku.com (as they're the single biggest instances of both Laconica and JaikuEngine) to get a feel for how the two systems work. Not only will this give you an understanding of how they compare to each other but you'll see how they differ from Twitter and be able to interact with the respective development teams.
Is there any plan to support the twitter API for now so there is no need for an separate client? Is there a timeframe for support for XMPP & federation? They seem a while away.
To us federation is not as important as XMPP.
Also Are there any migration tools available? Just in case things don't pan out well.