So Google’s purchase of Jaiku has happened and I am delighted.
It is a bit of the VHS versus Betamax battle – but where the better format wins! Jaiku is a much more accomplished, micro-blogging tool. It offers post comments/threads, groups, post/comment rss feed, external feed importing, embedable post icons, groups and fantastic mobile functionality (there’s probably a load more too!).
The one thing it has always lacked is a vast user-base, which Twitter has in abundance. Yet Twitter has almost NO functionality other than erm…search and rss.
As a predominantly mobile application, with a larger customer base, one can’t help wonder why Google hasn’t bought Twitter instead (to go with the Gphone no doubt!)
I sincerely hope that Google’s purchase of Jaiku really opens the application up to the users it deserves – it is significantly better than Twitter and the more users it gets, the better.
