09 August 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor
Love them or hate them (or the countless updates they contribute to Facebook news feeds), social games, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, have been major players in the social web sphere of late.
With Facebook the go-to platform for social applications developers, dependent firms are looking for ways to wean themselves off of the Big Blue F's revenue supply, while competitors - such as Google - are still looking for their piece of the pie.
Enter: Google's purchase of Slide
Last Friday, Mountain View finalised a $182 million plan to acquire Slide, the maker of several social media applications, such as the 'SuperPoke' function on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. This signals further actions by the company to enter the social media ring full-force.
"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," said David Glazer, engineering director of Google on the company's blog.
The search seraph already owns and operates several key pieces of the social web - YouTube, Picasa and Blogger among them. However, the purchase of Slide shows they've more up their sleeve when it comes to its potential aspirations to find a 'Facebook killer'.
Investing $100 million in Zynga, makers of Farmville, Cafe World and more, gives that impression as well.
Zynga, meanwhile, has been looking to lessen its dependence on Facebook users. The start-up most recently purchased Japanese social games outfit Unoh, hoping to successfully market its products to the Japanese public via mobile.
Google has long been rumoured to be at work developing GoogleMe, which would allegedly be a direct competitor to Facebook.
Could Farmville help topple Facebook's iron grip on social web dominance?
Love them or hate them (or the countless updates they contribute to Facebook news feeds), social games, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, have been major players in the social web sphere of late.With Facebook the go-to platform for social applications developers, dependent firms are looking for ways to wean themselves off of the Big Blue F's revenue supply, while competitors - such as Google - are still looking for their piece of the pie.
Enter: Google's purchase of Slide
Last Friday, Mountain View finalised a $182 million plan to acquire Slide, the maker of several social media applications, such as the 'SuperPoke' function on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. This signals further actions by the company to enter the social media ring full-force.
"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," said David Glazer, engineering director of Google on the company's blog.
The search seraph already owns and operates several key pieces of the social web - YouTube, Picasa and Blogger among them. However, the purchase of Slide shows they've more up their sleeve when it comes to its potential aspirations to find a 'Facebook killer'.
Investing $100 million in Zynga, makers of Farmville, Cafe World and more, gives that impression as well.
Zynga, meanwhile, has been looking to lessen its dependence on Facebook users. The start-up most recently purchased Japanese social games outfit Unoh, hoping to successfully market its products to the Japanese public via mobile.
Google has long been rumoured to be at work developing GoogleMe, which would allegedly be a direct competitor to Facebook.
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