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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Kevin Rose jumps on the Twitter-wagon

Om shares the non-news that Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka are working on an IM-like Twitter competitor. Andy Beal, Rex Dixon, and Paris Lemon speculate further.

Speculative options include:

1. Digg-ified Twitter Clone: Voteable twitter posts, sounds a lot like Guy K.’s Truemors. Plus, why not just build an IM submit pipeline for Digg itself, like Meshly uses?
2. An actual IM competitor (as opposed to a twitter competitor): I have no idea what this might entail; IM is a weird anti-hype vortex - its huge, used by millions, monetizeable, etc., but by-and-large buzz & hype free. The digg-squad could be the crew to sex-up IM again - they’ve got the promo chutzpah and better-mousetrap ideas to make it happen.

Will it be one or the other or neither? Who knows! Hopefully whatever it is is a separate corporate entity so that it doesn’t get pulled down when the DMCA grim reaper comes knocking for Digg.

aim, digg, im, instantmessaging, jaiku, kevinrose, livemessenger, truemors 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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