Jonathan Mulholland

Google’s acquisition of Jaiku back in October seems a long time ago now - such is the pace of the technology industry I guess. Subsequent OpenSocial and Android announcements have stolen much of the limelight since, but I keep coming back to the Jaiku purchase. I have a feeling that Jaiku is a bigger piece of Google’s new jigsaw than we’ve so far realised.

If Google simply needed a micro-blogging capability, why go for Jaiku and not Twitter? Twitter after all is the market leader in this growing sector, with an established and enthusiastic user base. Jaiku is certainly popular (especially in Europe) - but not close to Twitter when it comes down to size, popularity and ‘zeitgeist’.

There have been quite a few comments to the effect that Jaiku provided Google with a cheaper alternative to Twitter. Whilst what Google paid for Jaiku is certainly less than they would have paid for Twitter, I’m not convinced this is the reason.

We know Google have money to spend. If the purchase of a pure micro-blogging service was strategically important to Google then I’m pretty sure they would have found the money needed to buy the current leading service. Anyway it probably would have been cheaper still for Google to engineer some kind of status messaging feature directly into Google Talk and/or Gmail if that’s all they were after.

Why Jaiku then? I think the answer lies in mobility, specifically location and mobile integration.

Let’s look at location first. Jaiku is I think unique in combining micro-blogging AND user location awareness. For the uninitiated, when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users. Hmmm that’s interesting…

And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability ( - General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc).

So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well. That makes things really interesting, and its this combination that I think is the clever part. Consider this thought:

Post + Location + Status = Value

If you’re a user of Jaiku, or Twitter for that matter, look back through some of your posts and you’ll see that you’ve built an outline profile of your life. Reading through my Twitter and Jaiku pages it’s reasonable easy to deduce that I’m a Mac geek, a fan of American TV dramas, enjoy listening to Radiohead, suffer from occasional migraines, like Indian food etc etc. Now consider what value is added by a service that knows where you are and also whether it’s appropriate to contact you (through your mobile phone) as you post updates.

Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability. Imagine walking down the high street and having your mobile phone pop up with a Google notification telling you that Heroes DVD box sets were 20% off at HMV today, or that a new Indian restaurant had just opened in that part of town. Some may find that scary, and reminiscent of scenes from the film Minority Report, obviously as a technology ‘enthusiast’ I’m thrilled at the possibilities it opens up.

It seems obvious that Jaiku is destined to become an integral part of the the Android platform over the next year. No doubt Google will want the Jaiku engineering teams expertise in building the features outlined above into the Android offering. This is why I think Google went for Jaiku, and this is why I think Jaiku has a big role to play in the next phase of Google’s advertising platform.

If this isn’t what Google has planned for Jaiku, they should certainly think about it.