On Google and Jaiku

If you haven’t heard, Google has bought Jaiku – the Finland-based mobile IM and presence company – which happens to be the direct competitor to Twitter.

I won’t go into the details of why Jaiku over Twitter because that really doesn’t matter at this point.

What I do want to discuss is how Google will integrate this service. Nathan and I had a brief discussion today (ironically via twitter) on Google’s *secret* plans for Jaiku.

My guess? Tight integration with the Google Phone.

Any bets?

If you think like me you must naturally take the next step into what this inevitable integration really means. They said it best over at Loose Wire:

“All this information outlined above would be available to Google, to let them fire ads at us. For the first time, as far as I know, an advertising company not only has access to what we’re doing (our presence message), they have access to where we’re doing it (the cell ID etc), what we’re doing next (the calendar), how long we’ll be doing it for (the duration of the event), whether we’re focused on something else (indication of whether we’re on a call), as well as the usual preferences we may have registered in our profile (gender, age, interests, etc.)”

Oh, and not to mention what we search for (Google Search), say in our IM’s and VOIP (GTalk), email to our friends (Gmail), what products we want (Froogle), and what we read (Google Reader).

Interestingly disturbing eh? Can anyone say Skynet?

Tags: Google, Google Phone, Jaiku

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