Oct
Google purchases Jaiku
This is an interesting news item from Google that we thought might be of interest to some of our readers.
Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it’s more difficult to keep track of everyone when they’re running around at warp speed. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.
You may not have noticed, but we use Jaiku on the GUOM site. See the area at the right that lists what we’re up to? We can post our “what we’re up to status” using our IM client, sending an e-mail, visiting the Jaiku site or sending an SMS message via our iPhone. Sounds like Twitter doesn’t it? It’s similar, but what we like about Jaiku is that we can tie various RSS feeds to our Jaiku account. This means you can view our Jaiku status and see when we’ve posted new GUOM blog entries, added new photos to our Flickr pool or uploaded new video to our YouTube account. Multiple site updates in a single feed. Quite nice.
Now, here’s were we do something a bit strange. We don’t use Jaiku to publish our status. We use Twitter. The RSS feed from Twitter is fed into our Jaiku account so our Twitter status meshes into our Jaiku status. That way we can use our Twitter account (which has over 60 subscribers) to feed into our Jaiku (no subscribers) thereby only needing to make a single post. Does that make sense or is this all smoke and mirrors to most of you?
Now back to the original point of this post. Just what do you think Google has planned for Jaiku? Could this be another acquisition that will provide interesting features to their rumored gPhone? Hmmm….let the speculation begin.
