Wireless News Desk

"Your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally," wrote Jaiku's Finnish co-founder Jyri Engeström as he revealed yesterday that Jaiku had been acquired by Google. Jaiku's technology can hopefully help Google develop new ways to use mobile. The terms of the acquisition are confidential and the deal is officially closed.

According to the Jaiku homepage, maintained by Engeström and his co-founder Petteri Koponen:

“While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful.

Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.”

Jaiku's main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their "activity streams." (An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: a person's status messages, recommendations, events they're attending, photos they've taken - anything they post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds.

Recently  the Jaiku team had put in a special effort to create Jaiku Mobile, a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of a user's Jaiku contacts right in their phone contact list. (Currently Jaiku Mobile is available for phones based on the Nokia S60 software platform.)

Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Engeström and Koponen and the service was released on the Web in July 2006. Jaiku is based in Helsinki