Ever since Jaiku was bought up by Google, questions have been gathering about the mobile presence-based network. Now Ewan's spotted a pertinent post by Ryan Paul and has written up his own thoughts on the saga . Is Jaiku long for this world?
Read on in the full article.
A few years ago people were talking about the march of AOL, how it had "taken over" Time Warner and would combine infrastructure and content to dominate the media world. Now Time Warner has embarassedly dropped the AOL name, and AOL as an ISP is moribund.
Since then we've seen endless marches of Next Big Things with media lifespans shorter than a small mammal: Beenz, Clickmango, Friends Reunited, Lastminute.com, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook...
They're mostly still around, but the media seem to spend 6 to 12 months talking about how wonderful and life-changing they are, then never mention them ever again.
There's a response on the Jaiku blog to all the speculation, it's mostly positive, but is vague enough that it does not fully dispell the speculation that Jaiku may be on borrowed time.
Interesting times ahead...
Maybe one source of optimism is the way Google treated YouTube when they bought it. At first some speculated it would be absorbed into the already-existing Google Video service, but that never happened.