Another brand at the Googleplex
By: admin
Did you hear? Google bought Jaiku. I learned of this latest Google gobble while reading — you guessed it — my Twitter stream. Friends have been popping their Jaiku pages into Twitter posts left and right, while others ask one another, high school style “Are you going to Jaiku, because if you go I’ll go. But I don’t want to go if no one else is going.”
Actually high schoolers aren’t usually that straightforward. It’s good to be old.
The idea that Jaiku is all of a sudden more appealing than it was yesterday, just because Google owns it, is part of the point. If Joe’s Software Shack, or even my fearless publisher, Larstan, let’s say, had purchased Jaiku, no one would be re-evaluating their social networking and blogging activities. It wouldn’t even matter that the new owner had paid a lot of money. Jaiku would be Jaiku, and if you’re a Twitter person, it would require some convincing to get you moved over, not to mention a whole lot of friends and followers doing the same.
Google has not (yet) changed the service, or integrated it into its other offerings in any way, but most Jaiku users know/hope they will. And even if updates to Jaiku are awhile in coming, no one knows better than the Twitter crowd that the place you want to be is the place everyone else is, and Google, like Apple, has the power to create such a place in a way few others do.
But as all this craziness plays out, don’t underestimate the power of social network fatigue. I know plenty of people (wait, maybe that was just me) who ignored all attempts to get me into Yahoo Mesh.
If you laid out the features and tools available on Twitter versus those on Jaiku, the latter service would probably come out ahead. And Jaiku has (and has had for some months) powerful and influential fans. But people have stuck to Twitter, despite its sporadic downtime and lack of big upgrades. to drive home the point yet again, you stick with Twitter because that’s where your friends are. The question of whether Jaiku will cause the death of Twiter, or make it irrelevant does remain open, however. How many people will actually leave Twitter, and will the prospect of Google-ku affect the folks at Twitter to get to work on improving the mousetrap? I think these are unknowns at this point. Google has a way of integrating things so you can’t ignore it. But for the moment, I’ll stick with Twitter, and watch Jaiku out of the corner of one eye, just in case it makes any sudden moves.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I think the only real news here is that Jaiku now stands virtually no chance of going out of business. There’s the chance that it never really catches on and so Google shuts it down and writes it off as a loss, but don’t you sometimes get the feeling that Twitter is always about a week or two from having its servers turned off because they couldn’t pay the bill? At least now we know that if Jaiku does happen to supplant Twitter for whatever reason, at least Jaiku won’t be going under any time soon.
Part of me wishes Google had bought Twitter instead. Not because they would have done anything useful with it, but simply because (unlike Twitter) Google seems to know how to keep its servers up and running.
PS: do you remember our friend Pete Yorn? I was standing next to him at the Roxy tonight. Just thought I’d share