Think Jaiku is loosing to Twitter? Wait till Android Devices Start Shipping.

Twitter may be the current leading micro blogging service, but an obvious move by Google can turn that around overnight…

What Jaiku’s fans lack in numbers to Twitter, they certainly make up for in passion.  A post by Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström apologising for the apparent lack of activity since the Google purchase, and follow up criticism from Ars Technica and ReadWriteWeb have sparked a micro debate!

A lot of these concerns are being driven by what happened to Dodgeball following their purchase by Google in May 2005. For those unfamiliar, Dodgeball was a promising early mobile based social network that alerted groups of friends to each others locations via SMS notifications. The service showed promise but Google never found a clear direction for developing it, and the founders famously quit Google last year.

ReadWriteWeb report this week that Jaiku is loosing the user numbers game to Twitter.  Jaiku traffic fell by 30% last month, widening the gap between the two services:

These figures don’t look good, but this is a long game, and a clever move by Google could allow Jaiku to catchup to Twitter almost overnight.

What if Google where to build Jaiku into Android as the standard phone Address Book?  As soon as Android devices started to ship, Jaiku (whatever form it takes in the future) would gain hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users rapidly.  This isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds.  As I’ve posted before, Jaiku was originally conceived as a location and status aware address book; many Nokia users who have the Jaiku S60 client application installed already use the service in this way.

A Jaiku Android address book would be a real game changer in micro blogging, and best of all it would almost seamlessly integrate into daily life.  I realise this would not be without difficulties.  The service would need to scaled to support a rapid uptake of users, and Google would no doubt have to be very careful in building in privacy safeguards and assurances.  But the opportunity is there - Jaiku could easily catch up to Twitter this way, in fact the two services would then not necessarily have to compete.  If Jaiku were so heavily integrated into my mobile it would become my micro blogging service of choice by default.  I could then see myself, and other heavy Twitter users, reverse posting Jaiku updates to Twitter to share with others.

It’s great to see such passion and sense of ownership from Jaiku early adopters driving this debate. Also good to see that Jyri and the others are clearly listening to the ideas their users are having. Take a look through the articles Jyri has tagged on del.icio.us recently and you can see he’s personally watching the debate and the ideas Jaiku fans are discussing.  As I’ve said before I firmly believe that Jaiku will play a big part in Google’s next phase - as part of this it can still catch Twitter.