Google buys Jaiku

Competition is going to seriously heat up in the microblogging space now that Google has assimilated Jaiku.

With its rival Twitter also well-funded there should be some real progress in this area over the coming year. Personally I'll be happy when Twitter sort out their scaling issues and make the service reliable.

I think it was Fred Wilson (VC from Union Square Ventures who backed Twitter) who said that he thinks these services are interesting not so much as websites, but as 'plumbing' - a layer of infrastructure on the web upon which all sorts of services can be built. Interesting thought.