Google acquires Jaiku

Here's the news from the Jaiku team - another interesting piece of the puzzle in the long running Google Phone (probably an OS) speculation...

"Wonderful Jaiku users,

Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!

While its too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together.

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition at http://jaiku.com/help/google

Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders"

Jaiku - Rich mobile presence

Jaiku have recently launched a Beta version of their Series 60 presence application, that enables you to see the presence status and location of your contacts. Personally, I'm a fan of presence, provided that it complements existing apps and is not provided as an application in its own right. In this case, Jaiku have used it to pimp up the Series 60 address book but you need your friends to also be using the app to garner any real value from it. It also seems to be quite a resource hungry app with a noticeable impact on battery life and data usage (estimated at 10Mb/month). And once you've installed it, its tricky to remove..

I've also added their blog widget (see right) which links to the phone client showing whether I'm callable or not (not that anyone cares about this though!) still - it works!

Update 24/07 - This app eats more battery than 3G! I'm almost having to recharge my phone twice a day now, and so far it has been impossible to uninstall or remove. Not a happy bunny!