Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) recent acquisition of Jaiku goes further than letting people post ongoing snippets of their lives—and it could raise privacy concerns. “To begin with, the reasoning goes, Jaiku is not really about microblogging—those minimessages submitted by text or e-mail that made Twitter famous. Jaiku is “a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications,” and therefore “a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet,” Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter credited with the phrase Web 2.0, wrote in his blog” reports NYT. The general idea is that Jaiku’s mobile application will let people broadcast their location and how their phone is being used—such as what music is being played. This information can show up on their friends address book… Unsurprisingly, this raises privacy issues and the question of whether people will want to be constantly traceable, even by friends (I suspect that answer is “yes”, at least for a significant minority of the population). Of course, Jaiku is aware of this and is busily trying to give people as much control as possible in as simple a manner as possible, and as long as people are given the choice there shouldn’t be any real concerns about privacy.

• Microblogging Platform Jaiku Acquired by Google; Emphasis On Mobile