Twitter and Google-Jaiku can co-exist

News of the day: Google buys Jaiku.

If such news had to come—and if anything, I was expecting Google to make a run at acquiring Twitter—it is good it came today, a typically full one for my on the academic front. With a handful of deeper blog posts on the current micro-blogging champ Twitter sitting in the queue, I might be tempted to spend the next 12 hours working up a long(er) response. You get the hour-long short version today:

Don’t Panic.

There are at least five reasons why there is no world rocking as a result of this news.

1) It is Good to be King, and Twitter is King.
Micro-blogging has its roots in IRC, Instant Messaging and Facebook status messages, but the medium has only been around for a little over a year. In terms of Internet impact, it was Twitter’s successful showing at last year’s SXSW conference in March that sparked growth in it’s community and third-party application development. Jaiku and latecomer Pownce arguably have better interfaces, but neither has the traffic. If community were that easy to build, every PHPBB forum or MediaWiki install would be successful. Whatever the probability of this changing in the future, Twitter is the undisputed champ of today.

Micro-blogging traffic by Alexa. Props to Eric Skiff via a tweet

2) Google Integration is a Long Process
The 21st-century business model for IT is “Get Bought By Google.” Anyone following KillerStartups.com will provide testimony to the flooring number of new Internet-based companies trying to succeed enough to get noticed. A few, like Facebook, have spurned the short-term big bucks to make a play at being an industry giant in their own right. For those technology companies consumed by the Google machinery, there is a big difference between announcing a money transfer and becoming integrated into the system. In fact, with so many applications to worry about now, it becomes perhaps more difficult with each new purchase. Jot Spot was acquired a year ago but hasn’t knocked other wikis out of market. Blogger was a 2003 acquisition and saw WordPress get stronger. Google acquired a Usenet archive in early 2001 but didn’t integrate that information into Google Groups until the end of the year. In a nutshell, it takes time to make a new technology work.

Twitter’s recent investment by Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures might suggest that they are in it to stay. Wilson was attracted to the value in the community and richness of fanatic developers, enough to plunk down the dollars without a traditional business model. With a lead in the foot race and a fresh commitment of resources, Twitter will make use of the lag time in between a Google purchase and a full-blown Google app.

Integration, it should be noted, is a double-edged sword. Not only does this mean a complicated technical and business process to get Jaiku embedded in Google, but it also potentially changes the underlying nature of Jaiku. Pownce is pretty-pretty, for example, and has a bunch of extra features to facilitate file and link sharing. However, the more you add, the less Twitter-like it becomes, and perhaps the less desirable to use. It is conceivable Twitter will remain the micro-blogging tool of choice simply because it remains simple.

3) WordPress is better than Blogger
It is important to understand the short histories of Blogger and WordPress, two of the major blogging platforms. Blogger started in 1999 and rose to a million users by the time it was acquired by Google in 2003. WordPress, on the other hand, started that same year as a little open source code. While Google was taking a giant and trying to free up some use while integrating it into a developing suite of web applications, Matt Mullenweg was sewing the seeds of what would become a vibrant and creative community of users and developers. Reading some random links to a comparison of the two blogging platforms in 2005 and in 2006 and 2007 hint at the amazing surge of quality and activity in the WordPress community. Having a search engine for a parent company, even one as ginormous as a Google, doesn’t equate to market dominance. Sometimes, a strong, reliable and invested community is more powerful.

4) Open API Developers are as creative and resilient as the Google machine
From the start, one of the key factors in the rise of Twitter has been the impact that an open API has on spontaneous development. The list of third-party application for Twitter is impressive, especially for such a short life of product. These tools are being built by people excited about using the system and a low-barrier API to create hooks into the community information stream. Jaiku, it should be noted, has an API, too. The size of the community and slightly more complex system, though, kept the same level of development from happening. What will happen to that open development when it hits Google (especially if new user signups are slowed by the invite-only mechanism)?

Admittedly, this argument is the weakest of the five. However, even if Google can manage to maintain the ability for a developer to create some hooks into Jaiku, the Twitter community has far more to gain in keeping the tweet stream moving forward. Many ideas, minus corporate bureaucracy.

5) Micro-blogging is a niche market
For all the buzz, at the end of the day few people are microblogging. Competition and exposure will only help create more authors and followers (you don’t have to post to benefit from the social connectedness of a personal information stream), and Google has a sizable base of users to draw some more interest in the channel. I hope the folks in the Twitter HQ understand that an Internet giant investing money in a competitor is a huge endorsement of micro-blogging. Google has legitimized the medium, and that’s a win for everyone on Twitter.

I’m certain there will be a spike of discussion in my RSS feeds on this topic, but I figure I’ve got up to a year window before any of the above can be proven wrong. So, Kudos to Google for recognizing the value of micro-blogging, and Kudos to Twitter for building a foundation that will be resilient to market change.