Is Google Sliding Towards Social Gaming?
Google announced today that they acquired Slide, a social technology company.
According to the official Google post, Slide has "an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online."
If you read the post, you get the sense that Google is on the first 18th of the social media golf course, after a very long and bad golf game, hoping to finish up their round strong.
What am I alluding to? Well, social gaming of course. Since Google Buzz tanked and Google Wave wilted away, social gaming might be the one and only portion of social media where Google can make headway.
For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.
Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.
Google didn't share any other details, but reports said that Google paid $182 million for Slide, which was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, along with $46 million in employee retention bonuses.
The company has bought 21 companies in the first six months of 2010, according to the company's most recent quarterly filing with the SEC.
What do you think Google might be up to with this acquisition?
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