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Google’s acquisition of Jaiku, a small Finnish start-up active in the obscure and geeky field of microblogging - a word most often associated with the better-known company Twitter - might not appear to be an earth-shaking event.But the deal, announced in October, has much of the tech-tracking blogosphere buzzing with excitement. Some claim it is the harbinger of a brave, new and truly interconnected world, where a large chunk of our existence will migrate online.

To begin with, the reasoning goes, Jaiku is not really about microblogging - those mini-messages 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,” according Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter who is credited with the phrase Web 2.0.

In the words of Petteri Koponen, one of the two founders of Jaiku, their service is a “holistic view of a person’s life,” rather than just short posts. “We extract a lot of information automatically, especially from mobile phones,” Koponen said by telephone from Mountain View, California, where the company is being integrated into the Googleplex. “This kind of information paints a picture of what a person is thinking or doing.”

In practical terms, Jaiku’s mobile application allows users to broadcast not only their whereabouts, but how the phone is being used, even what kind of music it is playing. This information is then published online as a “lifestream.”

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