I found Chris Messina's post, Theories about Google’s acquisition of Jaiku — and two passages really caught my attention:
In the future, you will buy a cellphone-like device. It will have a connection to the internet, no matter what. And it’ll probably be powered over the air. The device will be tradeable with your friends and will retain no solid-state memory. You literally could pick up a device on a park bench, login with your OpenID (IP-routed people, right?) from any number of service providers (though the best ones will be provided by the credit card companies). Your user data will live in the cloud and be delivered in bursts via myriad APIs strung together and then authorized with OAuth to accomplish specific tasks as they manifest. If you want to make a phone call, you call up the function on the touch screen and it’s all web-based, and looks and behaves natively. Your address book lives in Google-land on some server, and not in the phone. You start typing someone’s name and not only does it pull the latest photos of the first five to ten people it matches, but it does so in a distributed fashion, plucking the data from hcards across the web, grabbing both the most up-to-date contact information, the person’s hcalendar availability and their presence. It’s basically an IM-style buddy list for presence, and the data never grows old and never goes stale. Instead of just seeing someone’s inert photo when you bring up their record in your address book, you see all manner of social and presence data. Hell, you might even get a picture of their current location. This is the lowercase semantic web in action where the people who still hold on to figments of their privacy will become increasingly marginalized through obfuscation and increasingly invisible to the network. I don’t have an answer for this or a moral judgement on it; it’s going to happen one way or another. …
In the scheme of things, it really doesn’t have anything to do with Twitter, other than that Twitter is a dumb network that happens to transport simple messages really well in a format like Jaiku’s while Jaiku is a mobile service that happens to send dumb messages around to demonstrate what social presence on the phone could look like. These services are actually night and day different and it’s no wonder that Google bought Jaiku and not Twitter. And hey, it’s not a contest either, it’s just that Twitter didn’t have anything to offer Google in terms of development for their mobile strategy. Twitter is made up of web people and is therefore a content strategy; Jaiku folks do web stuff pretty well, but they also do client stuff pretty well. I mean, Andy used to work at Flock on a web browser. Jyri used to work at Nokia on devices. Jaiku practically invented the social presence browser for the phone (though, I might add, Facebook snatched up Parakey out of Google’s clenches, denying them of Joe Hewitt, who built the first web-based presence app with the Facebook iPhone app). If anything, the nearest approximation to Jaiku is Plazes, which actually does the location-cum-presence thing and has mobile development experience.
A long post, full of good links and well worth pondering.
Incidentally, and for all their significant differences (IP-routed people!), the first paragraph quoted above recalled to mind Bruce Sterling's wonderful riff, Harvey Feldspar's Geoblog, 07.10.2017, on a future without a mobile phone:
"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.
He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.
A non-person, 'increasingly marginalized … increasingly invisible to the network'.
