Gaiku/Joogle? A platform for social signalling?
by Imran Ali
Google! Yahoo! Google! Yahoo! Goohoo! Yoogle! Yahoo! Yeeaaaaaarrghh! It seems every service I use these days - Flickr, del.icio.us, Feedburner, Upcoming, Writely - is swallowed up whole by one of the two giants ot the Web Cold War…fighting their proxy wars, startup by startup!
Earlier today Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku was acquired by Google, for an undisclosed sum, notaby to integrate Jaiku’s ‘Activity streams and mobile presence…where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users…a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams’.
It’s perhaps no accident that mobility is namechecked twice - a revealing comment, with the recent uptick in speculation that Google’s telephony play is less a handset and more a handset-agnostic OS or application suite.
Jaiku’s life stream has always been more elegantly implemented than its more popular counterpart, Twitter, enabling users to blend external RSS feeds with Jaiku posts; indeed, my own Jaiku account is automated, simply scraping RSS from Twitter, Flickr, my blog and other personal RSS sources.
Augmenting this life stream with Google’s suite of applications paints a compelling vision…
- Address books - GTalk user statuses set automagically; kinda like Tim O’Reilly’s vision of a smart address book.
- Blending social networks - bringing Jaiku’s life streams to the Orkut community, particularly its booming Asian and South American communities could help accelerate adoption of Google’s much vaunted Facebook-killer.
- Location aware contacts - user’s post their location via Jaiku, instantly marking themselves on Google Maps; great for iPhone users!
- Presence-based telephony - know the availability of a GTalk user, or Gmail contact, before placing a call
- Work status - let colleagues know when you’re working in Google Docs; perhaps great for timekeeping!
- Photocasting - let Jaiku syndicate your recently posted Picasa photos to your social network.
Couple this with Jaiku’s support for third-party data sources through RSS and you have a very powerful multiplexing engine; an open platform for signalling social and personal presence across the web and across mobile networks.
With these possibilities in mind - Jaiku may be one of the most significant acquisitions Google has ever made.
