In an effort to bring innovation to its products, search engine giant Google seems to be quite passionate about occasionally acquiring other companies that could help in their plans. Reports on Wednesday claim that Google has bought Slide, an online entertainment company for $182 million. TechCrunch was the first to make this information public. Later on, New York Times announced a completely different acquisition figure, of $228 million. We’re not yet sure which of the above is true but judging by how this rumor spread through many reputable news sources across the Internet, it’s pretty much a sure deal that Slide now belongs to Google.
Slide is currently making applications for various social networking web sites like Facebook or MySpace. The applications include SuperPoke Pets, Top Fish, SPP Range and SuperPocus Academy of Magic. It’s presented as a website that makes widgets to help people express themselves.
As you may remember there were a lot of rumors regarding Google’s intentions to get into the social networking business. This acquisition may be interpreted as a step forward towards turning a social networking project in development into reality. At this point we could speculate that Google is silently gathering up weapons of many types (in the form of acquisitions of useful companies that contributed in one way or another to social networking sites)to come up with a product that could seriously dethrone Facebook.
Earlier this week Eric. E Schmidt, the chief executive of Google announced that the company finds social networking to be very important. “Search is going to get better with more social information”, he said.
Google has also invested around $150 million in Zynga so far. Zynga is the biggest online social gaming company, but if the name doesn’t ring a bell, presenting it as the company in charge of Farmville, the popular game you can play on Facebook might. Apart from Zynga and Slide, Google is also rumored to be working with other gaming companies. While the search engine giant didn’t reveal a lot of information regarding its intentions, Schmidt did mention that Google would host games and other sources of entertainment, rather than create them. Slide was founded by Max Levchin, who was also a co-founder of PayPal. It’s not clear at this time whether Levchin will join Google or what his role will be in the whole project.
Google’s first attempt to provide some form of social networking for its users was Google Buzz. The service allows Gmail users share status updates, photos or videos. The company also has Orkut, which is a variation of Facebook. The networking site is popular in some parts of the world but hasn’t been adopted worldwide where Facebook and MySpace continue to dominate the Internet. Google and Slide haven’t announced anything so far but TechCrunch expects an official announcement to be issued on Friday.
