Jaiku was sold to Google. Congratulations to Jyri Engeström and the rest of the team. I’ve been promoting Jaiku around Europe. Many of the skeptics I’ve met – even in my closest visinity – should now come to terms in agreeing that I was right with the prediction of Jaiku having a bright future 
The app has already provided me with a lot of joy and new connections. The Jaiku Eurovision party was one of the most memorable times recently I’ve had with popular culture. It’s so quick to use in a rush that it’s going to be a great addition to my reflective toolkit, too.
I continue using Jaiku as a regular user and I look forward to possible private business use and integration with rest of the Google universe I just happen to use.
If I’m lucky, I will have a project involving Jaiku and contextual learning in the near future.
UPDATE: I’ve been following the conversation on the web about the acquisition. Rumored to be a 12 million dollar deal. Feels a bit low compared to 5 million investment done on Twitter… or more likely, Twitter is overrated. Valleywag and many others are so off the record with the analysis of Jaiku being a Twitter clone and rival. I don’t see the core value or features being the same at all. Jaiku is older than Twitter and there is one thing the American’s don’t understand about the service: 3G enabled stand-alone application on your phone frees you from the intrusive nature and limitations of SMS and provides so much more. Jaiku also does lifestreaming rather than presence updates. Twitter is like American’s discovering SMS and Jaiku is like finnish people doing mobile communications right. You can join video, audio and photo streams with the service. You know where your friends are, who they are with, what they are doing, if they are available and when they will be busy next. The whole conversation on the web proves that people who don’t live in Europe don’t understand mobile technologies at all.
Sorry about the generalizations 
Tags: Social computing