Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the RSS ad network, was just the latest, following Jaiku, JotSpot, Dodgeball, GrandCentral, and Measure Map. Their tales of doom in the Googleplex, below.

The digital revolution promised us that the nation state would wither away. But the spread of social networks show that however much the Internet connects us, quirks divide us. Take, for example, the inexplicable popularity of Twitter in Japan. Tokyo out-tweets New York and San Francisco combined. Pingdom, a website analyst, finds that Twitter is more intensely popular in Japan than in the United States. The conventional theories — Japan's high wireless usage, for example — fail to explain it.

Not happy with updating your friends publicly via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Jaiku (and feeding all those updates into FriendFeed)? Then, um, try Plurk, a startup which declares, "We've taken the time, the complexity, and the deep introspection required out of blogging." Also, too, the irony. [The Inquisitr]

Google and Twitter have teamed up to create a Super Twitter Tuesday Google Map, a useful enough mashup which shows election-related Twitter messages by location. More exciting? Google bought Jaiku, Twitter's main competitor, last fall.

For the fiancées of ambitious founders, there's a new metric of wealth for their future spouses to live up to: "I don't want you to sell unless you can make Miyake money." That's the amount Google apparently laid out for Jaiku, the Euro rival of Twitter. The exact purchase price hasn't been disclosed yet. But Jyri Engeström just announced that he and his bride-to-be Ulla-Maaria Mutanen are in Tokyo, getting her wedding dress personally fitted by famed designer Issey Miyake. (Girls, note this: She proposed to him.)

In explaining Union Square Ventures investment in Tumblr, Andrew Parker goes out of his way to distinguish the service from traditional blogs. But in explaining how Tumblr does not compete with Twitter, in which his firm has also invested, he makes it clear that, well, Tumblr is a blog — while avoiding the b-word at all costs. Tumblr is a just blog, and doesn't compete with Twitter. While services like Tumblr, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce are lumped together as microblogging tools because of their brevity, users recognize the dramatic differences in the software behind them and the experiences they create. They are more than blogs. Brevity may be the soul of wit — but it's not the ghost in the machine.

These days, when I hear that Google has bought a company, I feel sorry for its founders, however rich they're becoming. Google just bought Jaiku for a rumored $12 million. Not bad for a service that's mostly a copycatan identical twin of Twitter, allowing users to broadcast short messages to friends by text message and IM. Sure, they got a nice payout. But my gut tells me that the price was dooming Jaiku to irrelevance. Google's track record of botched acquisitions — remember dMarc Broadcasting or Dodgeball, anyone? Didn't think so — just grows longer and longer. At YouTube, most of the pre-Google employees are resting and vesting, I hear — waiting for their stock-option packages to reach full value, and then plotting their escapes. If Jaiku's employees are students of history, one hopes they inked an agreement that allowed them an early exit in case things go sour. Evan Williams, who sold his previous company to Google, must be softly chuckling to himself.