Google: Why Jaiku and not Twitter?

So the big question is the one that Adam Ostrow at Mashable asks in on the deal: Why Jaiku and not Twitter? I know that Jaiku has its fans — including Leo Laporte, who got upset that Twitter’s name was too close to the word Twit (which is the abbreviated name of his podcast This Week in Tech), and to move over to Jaiku — but there’s no question that Twitter had the name. Not only that, but Evan Williams of Twitter is a former Googler himself, having sold Blogger to the search engine giant.

Could that be part of the reason why Twitter wasn’t as good a candidate for an acquisition? In the comments on at Mashable, someone raises that possibility, suggesting that there might be bad blood between Evan and Google over his departure and that of other former Googlers who left to go and work at Twitter.

Charlie O’Donnell says that he sees the deal as a case of Jaiku’s founders and being absorbed by the Google Borg, something he says he finds disappointing. Google did the same thing with Dodgeball — which as far as I can recall was very much like Jaiku but was developed three years ago — and the founders later left, saying they were the lack of support from the search behemoth.

Marc Orchant at Blognation has about why Google decided to acquire Jaiku instead of Twitter, and so does . Both see Jaiku as being more about mobile “presence” rather than just being an instant-messaging style service.