I just received an SMS from the Jaiku bot saying that their SMS service was back up & operational.  I’ve sent a post via the SMS bot and it is working, so it would seem that maybe Google hasn’t completely abandoned the service after all.  This would be good. I liked Jaiku when it was first launched, it had a few features that I feel Twitter lacks (channels for one, plus native image posting) without over-complicating the service.

I’ve always thought that with GMail, GTalk, Grand Central & Jaiku, Google had the building blocks for a really comprehensive communications platform.  Add into that mix Google Apps & Google Docs and you’ve got a solid business system to work from.

Imagine if Google rolled GTalk, Jaiku and Grand Central into a single app/service.  It would suddenly become a serious competitor to Skype if they could get the sound quality and pricing right.  Skype was supposed to be the communications platform of the future (if you believed the hype), but due to a number of factors, including the acquisition by eBay and the fact they use a proprietary VOIP protocol, it hasn’t happened.  GTalk runs on an open VOIP protocol, so you can talk to non-GTalk VOIP clients. If done right that could be one killer app.

Exciting news: Google has bought Jaiku today.

What does that mean? First and foremost, we’re of course continuing to support our existing users. So fear not: your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally.

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.

Jaikido Blog: We’re joining Google

Yet another Google acquisition.  Interesting to see what happens here, is this just a market acquisition move, or do they have plans for the technology.  Will this get integrated into Orkut or stand alone.  You got to wonder when Google will start integrating all these purchases (like, when will I be able to view my feed stats from FeedBurner inside Google Analytics).

Funny that I read this just after reading about how Google handled previous acquisition.