I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Jaiku (twitter like) capability belongs with the other functionality that Google offers in their mobile application suite as the rational to Google acquiring Jaiku.

For all of those people: Jaiku, like Twitter, is what has become known as a microblogging service that lets people send short blasts of information about themselves to their friends and to the public. The company is based in Helsinki, and was founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. Not surprisingly both have been heavily involved in the mobile phone world.

Indeed both of these applications (twitter and jaiku) did not have a business model and in the longer term would need to change or die. They needed to live in a suite of application services that Google and Yahoo offer where they support each other.

It is also indeed true that this application is not particularly difficult to code. The problem is getting the network effect working for this application quickly. IE this is a time-to-market issue and Google is not particularly broke. Jaiku can be quickly up and running on my smartphone as another piece of the Google mobile apps puzzle.