Is Google (News - Alert) serious about social-networking opportunities? Judging from reports saying they've bought online entertainment company Slide, we'd have to say so.
Industry observer Nancy Gohring reported that Google acquired the company for $182 million, citing TechCrunch, which first reported the deal. "The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, put the value at $228 million," she noted.
Slide, as Gohring says, "develops virtual community applications used on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (News - Alert). They include SuperPoke Pets, Top Fish, SPP Range and SuperPocus Academy of Magic. The company was founded by Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal."
She also mentions reports that Google has invested in Zynga, the purveyors of the insidious Farmville Facebook (News - Alert) cult.
Maybe Google's just admitting that it really doesn't know how to build social networking apps itself. Remember Buzz, which as Gohring said was intended to let Gmail users share status updates, photos and videos? If you do it's because you remember the blizzard of negative publicity about the lax privacy standards with your friend list.
Google has something called Orkut which is evidently big in Brazil, and Gohring says they've decided to halt development of Google Wave, another social-networking-type application which this reporter thought was a cool idea, but which turned out to be a solution for a problem nobody had.
As far as Wave went, "We liked the [user interface] and we liked a lot of the new features in it [but] didn't get enough traction, so we are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced," Google's head Eric Schmidt (News - Alert) said. "We'll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won't be as a separate product."
Of course what Google's doing is rolling some of the better features of Wave into a social networking tool to rival Facebook, but we're not supposed to know that.
