Google buys Jaiku

Interesting that Google would want to go into micro blogging, but also not surprising that they would purchase either Jaiku or Twitter. It is more surprising that they bought Jaiku rather than twitter. Jaiku does not have the buzz that twitter has, but it does have a large number of folks, and people who use the process. Jaiku is pretty cool in its own right but does not have the user ecosystem or massive number of applications that twitter has.

That said, new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being. The idea here is to enable our team to get right to work with Google’s engineers on delivering a new, better service to you as quickly as we can instead of spending our efforts on optimizing the current back-end. Existing users will still be able to invite their friends, and those who are not yet on Jaiku can send us a request for an invitation to join. Source: Jaiku Blog

Of course, this is going to make everyone who has a comment stand out and give their thoughts on the whole thing. It is great for Google and it is great for Jaiku, what will be of more interest is what if anything Twitter is going to do. The smart thing to do would be to court Microsoft or Yahoo and see if they want to purchase them, or support them by taking a stake in the company like Microsoft has done with Facebook.

With 305 entries on the subject so far (check here), the real question is what will twitter have to do, if anything can be done, to try to offset this one. Google might not do much with Jaiku like Google let Dodge ball die on the vine. We will be waiting years to see what the end deal is going to look like. If the folks who run Jaiku now start to bail on Google once the options are set, then we will know more about what is happening under the cover.

In all this means that M&A activity is back to its good robust healthy level after the scare this summer with some M&A deals falling through because of the mortgage melt down and people not being able to afford to get funding to make things happen.

It might be a bubble, but as long as M&A activity remains healthy, then the tech companies will keep on marching forward. The only thing we need now are some new original ideas.