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Why would Google buy Jaiku?
By RickMeasham | October 10, 2007
I’m very active in the Jaiku third-party developer arena: Tonight I’m giving a talk to my local Perl Mongers on the perl library I wrote and showing off the concept of microblogging as a development tool. Thus, the news that Jaiku had been bought by Google initially made me very happy. Being bought by Google is a bit of a ‘Seal of Approval’ in the web2.0 world.
But then I started thinking about it some more, and the more I think about it, the more it smells.
In Google’s words: “We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products”
So what can Google gain from buying Jaiku?
- Users? No, Google has users-a-plenty. If they bought it to reduce the players on the field then they’d have bought Twitter’s userbase
- Microblogging? No, they have orkut
- Mobile presence sharing? No, they have zingku which has some way cooler features for that
- The Nokia app? Ahhh .. now here’s something worth buying. Their gPhone needs an addressbook and why go for a boring addressbook when your phone will have permanent networking? So they bought Jaiku’s addressbook .. and got a bunch of non-mobile microbloggers included.
Expect to see Jaiku microblogging discontinued and absorbed into their coming facebook competitor (Orkut 2.0 on November 5th?). Expect to see the Nokia App become the addressbook on the gPhone.
“We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products” .. not ‘We plan to continue to maintain Jaiku as it is and just make it better’
(Adapted from my comment at Jaiku)
Update: I note that Tim O’Reilly came to the same conclusionÂ
Topics: Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2007 at 12:17 am
you’ve stopped right before you’ve reached correct answer… LOL… Ahem, seriously, if you have tried recently http://google.com/gmm/ and noticed it became local-enabled based on network BTS reachability, you can get some … ahem… another point of view.