Congratulations to the folks at Jaiku for their deal to be acquired by Google.
I happened, by chance, to be at lunch today with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the lead venture investor in Twitter, when we got the news (via Twitter, naturally). I called out to him at the counter, while he was ordering our food. "Fred, Google bought Jaiku."
The big win of course would be if Jaiku supported the Twitter API in a plug-compatible way. Then all our apps that work with Twitter would work with Google's new tool.
http://jaiku.com/api (Doesn't appear to be a clone of the Twitter API, but they do have an XML-RPC interface, which of course we like.)
Scoble called while we were at lunch, saying this isn't about Twitter, it's about Facebook. Probably so.
In any case, our world changed today, while we were in a cab on our way to lunch.
Here I am on Jaiku:
http://davewiner.jaiku.com/
Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:45 PM
~About the Author~
Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.