The Google Monster has swooped again, this time devouring Jaiku, a social networking / microblogging service that’s a bit like twitter with a nicer interface. You’ll be able to see for yourself once the initial interest dies off a bit and Jaiku stops resolving as an error page.
It’s no suprise that Orkut decided to pick up Jaiku – as Robert Scoble points out, Google’s top page impression generator is Orkut, still the most popular social networking service in Brazil, India and elsewhere but mostly forgotten in North America and Western Europe.
I briefly met the founder of Jaiku, Jyri Engestrom, at the NMK Forum organised by Mike Butcher, now at TechCrunchUK, and was so impressed that uploaded a video of his entire conference presentation. I like the service but never did find any of my existing friends using it so I sort of gave up on it.