Storm

Just in case you hadn’t turned on your feed reader today, here is a bit of news for you straight from the horses mouth,

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.

I am really happy for the Jaiku folks. Other than a slightly unbalanced signal versus noise ratio, they have a good site and Google will probably only make them better.

That being said, what is far more interesting than the event itself is the surrounding news coverage. I have always wondered what the effect of a press release catching lightening in a bottle in the blogosphere looks like. This provides a great test bed for that kind of study because before this point Jaiku was a marginally popular, but mostly ignored “twitter-clone”. If today’s swell of coverage is to be believed, it is now the tech media’s darling of the week.

First, lets look at some traffic statistics before things get more out of hand.

Eye Of The Storm

jaiku.jpg

If you are willing to ignore the fact that Alexa is an obtuse and generally inaccurate means of measuring traffic, you can see that as of two days ago the world didn’t really care. Traffic statistics had leveled out and the name Jaiku was met with a resounding “meh”.

Even on the arguably more accurate Compete, you can see that up until this point Twitter’s growth has substantially outpaced Jaiku’s.

Now, take a look at these meta-statistics.

  • 9000+ - Technorati tags (most in the last 24 hours)
  • 1241 - google blog search (in the last 24 hours)
  • 5830 - Twitter (mentions today)
  • 10 / 65 - Techmeme (Headlines/Discussions)
  • 19 - Digg Posts (today)
  • 3 - Reddit Posts (today)

When you compare that to Twitter,

  • 334 - Google blog search (subtracting mentions that involved Jaiku)
  • 5000+ - Technorati tags
  • 0 - Digg Posts
  • 0 - Reddit
  • 0 / 0 - Techmeme

Web 2.0 Roundup

If I were taking bets, you are currently witnessing the opening thundercrack of a Blogstorm. With web apps, it has never had anything to do with the technology. All that has ever mattered is the implementation mixed with the ever changing whims of the blogosphere. Do remember the SXSW was one of the major reasons that Twitter became as popular as it did. All that it takes is one defining event.

What do I expect to happen? I think that this will be a very good weekend for the Jaiku team. Even though they have locked down their user signups, they have suddenly gone from the blacksheep in the increasingly packed stable of social networking to the main event. Which means that when things open up again, it will be a brand new game. I also predict that Twitter will finally take the steps necessary to get their system to scale because if they don’t, things will go bad really quickly.

In an industry like “social messaging” that relies on the precarious tri-pod of hype, simplicity and inertia media favor can make or break you. It’ll be really interesting to see how Twitter responds and if Jaiku’s entrance on the stage is the perfect storm that I think it might be.

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