When Google announced that it had acquired microblogging platform Jaiku back in October of 2007, I was impressed. With rumors of an impending mobile-related announcement boiling over, it was a foregone conclusion in my mind that Google had made a brilliant move.

One short month later, the Open Handset Alliance was announced along with the Android OS, and the endgame was obvious: Google was about to change the way we use smartphones to interact. It would use the Jaiku platform to breathe life into mobile phonebooks. It would keep us connected to our contacts at all times. It would allow us to easily track and interact with individual contacts or groups of contacts like never before. It would make Android the most social mobile OS on the planet.

Here we are in February of 2010, and the reality is just the opposite.

Android is quickly becoming a jumbled mess. The biggest strengths of open source are also its biggest weakness -- the disconnect of different manufacturers working with different OS versions and building different skins that bring different functionality to the forefront. Everything is different.

As I mentioned, this is a big draw in many ways. Manufacturers can use the OS for free, and they can essentially do whatever they want with it. If HTC wants to skin Android with Sense UI and offer a variety of widgets to make various streams of information instantly accessible, so be it. If Motorola wants to target a younger crowd and make social networks the star of the show, let it be done. If Samsung wants to slide a weird 3D cube into the UI, sure, go for it.

The problem with this however, is that there is a massive disconnect in the Android ecosystem. Different OS builds on different devices mean that not all Android phones offer the same core functionality. The Motorola CLIQ is a great social networking phone, but it's missing Google Maps Navigation. The nav-equipped DROID is a powerhouse, but it's missing multitouch. Sure, many Android phones will be updated eventually to gain that missing functionality, but by the time the necessary updates hit each respective phone, there will be newer builds that offer more functionality. It's an endless cycle.

Smartphone users might argue that they're used to this paradox, and that the concept of waiting for new features to be delivered in an OS update is nothing new. There's a central difference with Android, though -- the core OS itself really has nothing to offer. It has no specialty or unique draw. It's a jack of all trades, master of none in the truest sense of the expression. The iPhone OS has a sexy, simple interface and an unrivaled app ecosystem that affords endless expansion. WebOS has beautiful refinement, intuitive gestures, Synergy and task management that bests every other platform. BlackBerry OS features industry-leading security and brilliant messaging/PIM management. And so on.

Android, in its pure Google-built form, is an also-ran.

There are plenty of things Google could have done to make Android unique and give it flair. One in particular, was to build a social interconnect using Jaiku as its foundation. Jaiku, as some may recall, was a Twitter-like social networking platform that was much more functional and personal compared to Twitter, but also infinitely less popular. It was ripe for the picking, and Google swooped.

Despite the fact that Jaiku's roots were Web-based, one of the most interesting aspects of Jaiku was its mobile offering for the Symbian platform.

Jaiku was built and co-founded by an ex-Nokia employee, Jyri Engestrom, who managed to turn the service into the social network of choice for Symbian users. The Jaiku app was integrated deeply into the Symbian OS and essentially acted as a living, next-generation phonebook. Contact locations and statuses were always available and always accessible. Conversations could be started and joined with ease, and the end result was a level of user evangelism and loyalty that I have yet to see generated by any other similar service.

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