JAIKU IS JOINING GOOGLE. That's what Jyri Engeström says. He writes that they "look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together." If you can still join Jaiku, you should run straight over and get your user ID, then open a channel. If you cannot, just wait patiently and you'll soon be able to see why Jaiku services have produced the most efficient internet texting platform on the planet, complete with public and private groups, newsfeeds and threaded conversations. Jaiku posts already appear in Google search engine results and with the two joined at the waist, it would suggest a searchable text message strings are next, right ahead of consolidated lifestreaming.
Jaiku, more so than Twitter, can gather and consolidate short bursts of information better than any other service. This is much more apparent when you see Jaiku running on a Nokia Series 60 third edition phone. That S60 client gives you telepresence, so when you're in a place and want to hook up with someone else in your Jaiku circle of friends, your phone tells you they are nearby. Now imagine what happens when a juice kiosk, brothel, news agent, or Starbucks assumes a Jaiku identity. Your phone would tell you that you're near a service you need. And if you have a high-end Series 60 phone, your phone's maps would take you to the place.
Google wants telepresence to work because the best return for text advertisements occurs when they are localised. Nothing localises better than a mobile phone that is connected to a geotagged mobile phone antenna.
Then there's the social dimension of talking to people who are nearby. Both Gmail and Google Talk could be blended into the Jaiku stream of text. Put all these components aboard the gPhone and you have a 21st century teleporter. This really smart phone could tell you where you are, show you a map that permits you to zoom out to a helicopter view, discover people nearby who could answer questions and even get you laid. The last piece of speculation comes after discovering a working girl in Dublin with a Jaiku identity.
Several months ago I discovered I could get to the front page of a Google look-up just by forming my 140 character Jaiku messages in a certain fashion. This suggests to me that Google has already figured out the reverse--how to dynamically generate contextual information that appends to the bottom of Jaiku messages. It's already drop-dead easy to snap Adsense code onto the bottom of a Jaiku RSS feed and to amalgamate feeds from various blogs, photostreams and calendars into a very dynamic lifestream. This results in a totally new level of metadata.
Like many others, I hope Google's acquisition of Jaiku does not stifle Jyri's vision of where technology needs to complement lifestreaming. I hope the Jaiku acquisition is truly part of a company strategy and not merely a Google employee acquisition. I hope Jaiku rolls out its subscription plan so I can lock down and control membership in specific channels. I hope Jaiku lets me map phone numbers to its SMS gateway just like chat show hosts announce premium text numbers for their callers. I hope Jaiku gives channel admins more control of the content that can be added at the top and tail of the text messages sent to phones.
But I know some of the things on my wishlist would annoy others because my feature list includes some technologies that would increase textual noise. This is a sensitive concern because those text messages go directly into the hands and vibrate in the purses of millions of people who use texting as part of their lifestyle. Now Google is at the door and that could be big changes on the landscape of mobile messaging.
Nadya: Google stole my boyfriend.
Liam Noonan is not impressed that Jaiku shut down new subscriptions.
Ross Mayfield -- "One day your Google homepage may be a stream of your friends and what they are doing, sharing, and adopting."
Damien Mulley considers Jaiku to be "the better microblogging service out there."
Robert Scoble hates it that Jaiku "really doesn't doesn't show followers".
Russell Beattie -- "Did some company buy another today?"
