Jaiku To AppEngine?

  I was reading something about the downfall of twitter and came across a link to a post on Jaiku blog

We know. It is frustrating. We believe the migration to Google App Engine will result in improved stability, so we made the hard call to invest all of our effort in finishing up the port rather than do what was needed to keep up our old servers up to date  [Jaikido Blog | Making progress]

Reading more on the Jaiku blog, I found this other post on the move to AppEngine:

We’ve been working quietly for a while to port Jaiku to Google infrastructure. Today we’re taking off our welding goggles to announce Jaiku will be one of the first apps to run on the new Google App Engine.

If you are not familiar with Jaiku, it is a similar service to Twitter which was acquired by Google about 8+ months ago, but has not shown any progress. Whether it is capable of replacing/competing with Twitter is another story. What is interesting is the move to AppEngine.

• Does it really take 8 or more months to port Jaiku to AppEngine? I know user accounts can be messy, but this seems like an awful long time, especially when scale is out the equation.
• Does this mean AppEngine is going to get some support for background processing? I really like what I see in AppEngine, but the lack of background processing has deterred from spending a lot of time with it.

It will be interesting to see what happens once they finally roll out an update hopefully along with some enhancements to AppEngine.