Google gets Jaiku
Interested to find out last night that Google has snapped up Jaiku. Jaiku is the quieter, more polished version of Twitter with the focus more on presence than micro-blogging. I don’t think this is in any danger of being dodgeballed. I wrote about it a while ago and it’s key selling point still stands out as it’s location awareness. Couple this with mobile Google maps (also on my phone) and you have something rather compelling.
This has got to put a dampener on Twitter who were probably hoping to get snapped up by the big G in the same way Blogger.com was. I think it’s good news on the whole. It’s positively disruptive. It breaks Twitter’s conceptual dominance on mobile updates and it’ll help define the difference between micro-blogging and presence. Presence is an underdeveloped concept and it’ll be interesting to watch how these services deal with the issues once they recognise them.
New user registrations have closed for the time being as Google gets stuck in. If you want to try it out, and I know you, I can invite you.
