Google’s New Acquisition: Jaiku

Google’s latest acquisition is the popular twitter-like site Jaiku. I am a user of both Twitter and Jaiku and have enjoyed participating on both sites. Although Twitter has been the most popular micro-blogging site, this news from Google may eventually change that, or at least bring greater growth to Jaiku and put it in the limelight for the moment. I thought the following quote from the Google Blog regarding the acquisition was pretty interesting…

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.

Micro-blogging helps us make up for that loss of contact and communication we may experience due to technology making our lives more fast paced. In a way it helps us better keep tabs on what all our family, friends, and contacts are up to, but since it is voluntary and permission based only people who want to share will be tracked, so there is no invasion of privacy. Helping us better stay connected is why Google has acquired Jaiku. Personally, I think they could go a whole giant step further in that goal if they were to acquire Facebook also.