TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Google’s Doing It Again: Jaiku dying on the vine?

Google has an annoying habit of making acquisitions, and then letting those acquisitions die on the vine as (presumably) the talent behind them is employed elsewhere in the Googleplex. The seminal example is DodgeBall,,
who’s founder’s public departure from Google lead many to question Google’s ability to successfully integrate their purchases into their core proposition.

More recently, it looks like Google’s doing the same to Jaiku. “Jaiku users flee to Twitter,” “Jaiku woes plague Google,” and “What is Google’s plan for Jaiku?” are not the kind of headlines one wants to see three months after a purchase.

So what then is Google’s deal? Does anyone there really know how something like Jaiku or DodgeBall should be integrated into the Google-mission to index all information? It would seem not. Google has been roundly criticized for going off in too many directions, and it would seem that purchases like Jaiku are symptomatic of “executive pet projects” - i.e.: purchases made on a whim when a powerful exec mentions that they’d be good to have under their corporate umbrella, but without any real thought behind it.

While a cash-rich company like Google may enjoy the luxury of making poorly planned purchases, they’re not doing themselves, their customers (us), or entrepreneurs any favors. Internally, Google is building teams of disgruntled, neglected staff that have come in the door with acquisitions but found that their new working environment more or less doesn’t care about their aspirations. Further, once dynamic, growing products become static and neglected, to the detriment of that product’s customers (witness the Jaiku flight). Finally, the bright light of an entrepreneur is covered or otherwise extinguished as its subsumed by the Googleplex.

All told, it seems like a sad state of affairs that should be some senior Google’s priority to rectify.

dodgeball, google jaiku

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Facebook Acquisition - Round X; I bet Google

I call Google FTW. The internets are all atwitter that facebook is on the block again - the Guardian says Yahoo is at it again; Battelle speculates that GOOG might snipe it like they did with DoubleClick.

Personally, I’ve thought Google is the more likely candidate for a while. Despite their occaisonal dropped balls on acquisitions (dodgeball), Google is about two things: platform and volume, which feed off each other and together are monetizeable. Advertising? Google built the platform. Search? Same. Video? Yup. Any area of online tech that you look into, Google has a major foundational play under way - if not a platform in a traditional sense, then a product option that has so much market power that it is the defacto platform or standard in its space.

Except social networking. Orkut, however you slice it, is an abject failure. Facebook would fill that gap, and the Facebook platform philosophy works nicely with Google. Google and Facebook could exchange hooks, interfaces, and API’s very quickly and create integrated products that deliver real value FAST.

Final note - I remember comments from GOOG’s CEO from a few weeks ago to the effect that Google wants to be able to tell you what you should be doing for the weekend. THAT’S A SOCIAL FEATURE.

So - when all is said and done, I call Google for the buy, Yahoo for the runner up. The only thing to derail this would be the SEC.

billions, dodgeball, facebook, GOOG, google, microsoft, orkut, sec, social, socialnetworking, weekend, yahoo YHOO

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Meshly - diggable IM bookmarking

RedWriteWeb points us to Meshly: an IM bookmarking service that takes del.icio.us, adds digg-style voting, and uses IM as a front end. Bookmarking on Meshly works by IM’ing a Meshly chatbot (AIM: meshly, GTalk: meshly@gmail.com, MSN: meshly@meshly.com), and entering simple commands to initiate a stream of prompts:

Pages that you bookmark through IM show up on the Meshly site in your user profile, and can be voted on my Meshly.com visitors:

Even the signup process takes place via IM:

The bottom line is that Meshly provides a well executed digg/delicious alternative with a gimmicky-yet-valuable twist in the use of IM as primary UI. Its fast and easy to use, and if you’re a regular IM user (I hit meebo a few times a day), it fits into your regular workflow nicely, and is about 10x faster to submit to than Digg. The MyMesh tab on the website (once you’re signed in) provides channel and tag indexing for your bookmarks, making for a similarly powerful user-experience as that provided by del.icio.us.

Josh Catone rightly suggested that the concept of channels and tags overlapped and created redundancy. I can see what Meshly intends (user created content areas), but along Josh’s thinking, I’m not sure why tags can’t form the basis of this. Del.icio.us makes a single layer folksonomy easy-to-use, so can Meshly. Josh also suggests adding a del.icio.us-style bookmarklet to enable people to use Meshly without IM; while it sounds good conceptually, doing so might dilute Meshly’s source of differentiation - I’m not sure if utility outweighs branding or not here. Meshly could also use a web sign-up - presently registration is only through IM client.

One other question I had was Meshly’s business model: If much of the Meshly activity takes place via IM, is their ability to advertise and make money compromised? I’d be curious to see a by-activity breakdown on del.icio.us traffic and see how big a slice Meshly is missing by going IM.

In any event, Meshly is hitting a chord and getting good coverage around the web. I think Twitter has really primed people for more in the way of “instant” services… prepare for more to come down the pipeline.

1. Rexduffdixon suggests that with email overload becoming a hotbutton issue, IM may be ready to get more attention as an alternate transaction channel.
2. Libraryclips suggests also taking another look at clipmarks, spurl, and netvouz.
3. 901am compares Meshly to enabling digg-voting on every inane Twitter that you put out - personally, I don’t think the comparison applies, as Meshly is (for now) more bookmarking than just Twitter-babbling.
4. Muhammad Saleem sums up Meshly as “not greater than the sum of its parts” - suggesting that all of its functionality is available elsewhere in more established services already.

aim, bookmarking, clipmarks, delicious, digg, dodgeball, gtalk, im, meshly, msn twitter

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Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?

Om covers the departure of DodgeBall’s founder and first employee from the Googleplex. Of particular note is the comment in the departing team member’s announcement:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Sheesh - fighting for engineering resources. Sounds like something more likely to happen at IBM, Microsoft, EDS, or some other lumbering 1.0 titan - not everyone’s favorite wizard of innovation. This is where I question Google’s scattershot approach to prioritization - why does Google pump resources into something like Google Base, Google Bus Routes, or Froogle, while viable acquisitions die on the vine?

If you’re losing presumably valuable people (you paid for them) and flatlining acquisitions (that were previously media superstars), its time to re-visit your internal prioritizion system.

EDIT: Scoble makes a parallel point - that Google has gotten “big company disease” and is no longer able to understand/leverage/utilize things below a certain scale threshold. This is similar to what I mentioned above - Google’s prioritization is skewing away from small/nimble/innovative towards large/slow/monolithic.

dodgeball, google, jaiku, sms, techfold twitter

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