Google acquires jaiku not twitter

Looks like Google is on an acquisition spree. One more to their kitty. (They recently acquired Zingku) Today they acquired Jaiku, a Finnish based company that supports micro blogging, location based presence etc. So this definitely says something is cooking in Google with respect to mobile phone. There has been so many rumor and articles about Google phone. I was amazed to see so many people interested and excited to see Google enter the mobile arena. Albeit, iam one of them.

Iam still wondering why Google bought jaiku instead of twitter, which is the most popular micro blogging platform. I guess part of it could be because jaiku supports a mobile client and it’s more than a micro blogging platform. It has a rich feature set. Other than micro blogging, it supports user location, network location, presence and sharing availability and Web feeds. This could be one of the reasons why they might have looked lucrative to Google. Some people call jaiku mobile client as an active phone book; I don’t believe so. I had jaiku client installed on my nokia 6600 way back in march-April this year. I found the mobile client had way too many options and was a great fit for geeks than other folks. For now, jaiku supports only symbian handsets (nokia), not sure if they have any strategy of supporting other clients. Iam sure they will have an uphill task in supporting all these features on different handset. Anyway with Google on their side, they are definitely in the driver seat.

Here is what Google has to say in their Blog

“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.”

Some info from jaiku Camp (Check out the FAQ)

“Jaiku is joining Google. While it's too soon to comment on specific plans, we 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. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. “

Oh BTW, there is another cool website I found through one of my reader’s comment that aggregates all the Google phone news...
Also, checkout my Article on Google phone.