Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Jaiku, the social media company based out of Finland, announced today on their website that Google is acquiring the small startup. Jaiku, which has been competing for the past few months with Twitter and Pownce for global attention, is not commenting on the terms of the deal or specific plans. Jaiku posted a vague and bland Q&A about the purchase on their website. I was one of Jaiku’s first beta users and have wrote about them on numerous occasions. I am a little stunned by the purchase since I was never floored by Jaiku’s features or technology. In fact I was hoping that Google would have bought Twitter since I have been a huge fan (and user) for some time. But, hey my stock isn’t in the hundreds so I will trust Google knows what they are doing. ***10.10.2007 update*** Got an email from Jaiku this morning announcing the deal: 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

The good folks at on-demand IPTV service Joost announced today that they are coming out of their “private beta” and now allowing anyone to download their application and enjoy over 15,000 shows. Now of course for anyone that is familiar with Joost, you know that their “private beta” wasn’t that private - over 1,000,000 users signed up during this period. In what is becoming a crowded field, Joost stands out due to their quantity and quality of content, including deals with media giants CBS, Major League Baseball, MTV, Turner and Comedy Central.

I am a huge fan and you should be as well…so download it now!

The other day I ran across one of the cooler FireFox extensions around, especially if you are into SEO and Social Media Optimization. The Social Media for FireFox extension is brought to us by the guys at 97th Floor, a SEO company based out of Utah. The tool, does a couple of really cool things. First you will see that in your FireFox browser status bar the 4 big players in social media / bookmarking - Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us ( see image below). The tool has two settings, manual and automatic. When you click manual on any given page you will see how many times that page has been bookmarked on those various sites, then you can click on any of them to bookmark it yourself…its like having a toolbar for all 4 wrapped into one. When you choose Automatic it will automatically check every URL you visit. Cool right? Well, we aren’t done yet. The other, feature is even more impressive. When you are on one of the four included social news sites, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, you will see icons appear next to each story title with the submission information. For example, lets say you are on Digg, you will see how many times that article has been submitted on Reddit, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. That means you can scan a site for a popular article and send it over to another site that hasn’t had it submitted yet. Right there your credibility on the other sites shoots through the roof. Awesome right? Download it now is all I have to say.

Skype CEO and Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom announced at a Skype event in Estonia that Joost, the peer-to-peer Internet TV application, has signed up more than a million beta testers and should be ready for an end of the year launch.The announcement was the first time Joost has released any sort of usage figures, but with a million "beta testers" you shouldn’t be surprised that they would spread the word of this significant accomplishment.

Internet TV is a medium I am watching closely, it has and will have the buzz but the true test will be getting beyond the early adopters and convincing the general TV audience. In the end it will all come down to content…

News came out today that "Web Discovery Tool" Streakr.com has officially entered into Beta after a year of development. Streakr is looking to take away some of the buzz around popular Web 2.0 stalwart StumbleUpon by offering a similar service that revolves around a user downloading a "discovery" toolbar and either recommending websites or "stamping" them with a thumbs up or down. The users preferences and favorites are then saved to their Streakr profile. How Streakr is trying to differentiate itself is by adding social networking functionality will take web discovery to the next level.

 “Streakr is unique in that it brings together web discovery, social bookmarking and a social network in a user-friendly, customizable environment." Said  Neil Gould, co-founder and CEO of Streakr. “Web 2.0 is all about discovering, creating and sharing, so we’ve built Streakr to reflect that. One click and you can find the hidden gems of the web; rate them and instantly share them with your friends. The beta phase is to build up the database of cool sites, iron out any glitches and gather feedback from the Streakr community on other features they’d like to see. Streakr allows everyone to be part of Web 2.0, regardless of their technical know-how. They can find sites they like without trawling through search-engines and then share them.”

Along with the web discovery, social bookmarking and social networking functionalities, Streakr also offers fully customizable profile pages, public comment on each profile, a photo gallery and a bare-bones MP3 player.