If you're at all like me, Twitter is your digital heroin. Google
Should you care? Not according to Foolish colleague Seth Jayson, who skewered the deal after Google made it:
We're back to dot-com mania, where big companies are chasing new concepts for no reason other than to get a foot in the door and keep others out. Doesn't make a bit of difference if that door leads to a good place or not. After all, there's no indication YouTube is destined to be a profit earner. Nor any of the online "office suite" that Google has cobbled together.
All true, and yet entirely off-point. Google no more needs to charge for its properties than do CBS
What's more, we know from Google's AdSense data that it can transform digital scrub brush into a cash factory. Microsoft
- Grab good digital real estate on the cheap.
- Put ads on that real estate.
- Cultivate what works (i.e., Google News).
- Replace what doesn't (i.e., Google Video).
So yeah, Jaiku is a narcissistic and not-terribly useful service. You could argue the same about Twitter. (Though, as a writer, it does help me to get more of my stuff read.) Google doesn't care. Nor should it. Jaiku is just more real estate in a digital empire that's beginning to make Donald Trump look small.
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