All aboard: Google opens up GrandCentral, what about Jaiku?

Google today announced on its Blogger Buzz blog that it is opening up its mobile calling/web integration service GrandCentral for new signups. While Google claims the offer is only open to “bloggers” and that the site is still in private beta, anyone can sign up by simply following this link – no official blogger card required.

Google purchased GrandCentral in July of last year (our coverage). Though speculation had been that they would use the service to beef up some of their offerings such as Google Talk, instead, Google quickly closed the service to new sign-ups and seemingly did little with it until now.

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Both the GrandCentral purchase and Google’s acquisition of the status update/personalized aggregator, Jaiku, in October of last year (our coverage) were thought to be central to Google’s move into the mobile realm.

However, just as with GrandCentral, Jaiku has been sitting still in terms of improvements while rivals like Twitter and Pownce pass it by. Google interestingly enough chose to team up with Twitter rather than Jaiku for a Super Tuesday Google Maps experiment (our coverage).

Both GrandCentral and Jaiku were purchased before the scope of Google’s Open Handset Alliance and Android was known.