What a Difference a Week Makes to the Buzz around Jaiku

Published by Ewan Spence at 14:53 UTC, February 11th 2010

By now you’ll have spotted the impact that Google Buzz has had on the web; but I was struck by something that had flown past my browser on Monday. It was an article by Zach Epstein on “Know your Cell” about the missed opportunity Google had with Jaiku and its founder, Jyri Engestrom – who up until his departure was the Product Manager for what was to become Buzz. Read on for a few dots-joining thoughts...

Zach Epstein, in “Know your Cell”, looking at Jaiku from a purely mobile angle, laid out why Jaiku could have been the social network glue that held together the Android address book:

"The outside social network integration (the foundation for which was already there, in the form of Jaiku's ability to pull in feeds from any source) would have made Google's mobile OS the ultimate social networking OS, and Android-only elements -- enhanced messaging, image and file sharing, automatic location and status updating, etc -- would have sealed the deal."

Sometimes though, the big picture is hard to see, even when it's laid out in front of you, as is the case with Buzz and Jaiku. Here's an quote from Jaiku founder Engestrom’s blog:

"Here’s what I suspect.

Although Google’s getting into the game late, the timing may be just right. The game is no longer just about “what are you doing”. As microblogging has become more popular, the stream has become more busy, and people are getting tired of sifting through the noise. So, now that pretty much everyone has shown up for the party, the value is moving to discovery, context, and relevance.

The question we increasingly feel our social inbox should answer better is: “given what you know about me, look at everything I subscribe to and show me only the updates I care about most right here, right now.” In one word: Search. And who has the advantage there? We know who."

While Engestrom is quick to credit the whole Google product team (“Of course, I left a good while ago and credit is due in its entirety to the team at Google”), I think it would be fair to say that the goal of Jaiku and what it displayed was a clear vision of the future, more so than Twitter to be honest, and I’ll be following his new start-up (not announced yet) with keen interest.

More at Know your Cell and Engestrom’s blog.

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