Mountain View, California — In an attempt to keep the dissipating audience glued to its site, search engine behemoth Google Inc. over the weekend confirmed in a blog post that it has acquired social widget maker “Slide Inc.,” a deal that gives the Internet search leader a team of developers with extensive social-networking experience capabilities to compete with Facebook.
Right on schedule, the search engine giant said the purchase will help it bring users together and has now formally announced its acquisition of Slide. On the company’s oficial blog, David Glazer says:
“For Google, the web is about people, and we are 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,” engineering director David Glazer wrote in a blog post.
According to a person familiar with the matter said Google shelled-out $182 million for Slide, along with $46 million in employee retention bonuses, the technology blog TechCrunch reported last week.
Slide, a social-media firm that was established by PayPal veteran Max Levchin and had initiated some of the earliest breakout hits on the Facebook platform. Levchin and the Slide employees will be transitioning over to Google.
“As the Slide team joins Google, we will be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and spread-out these capabilities for our users across the Web,” Google’s Glazer wrote in a company blog on Friday.
Slide creates applications and essential goods for Facebook, MySpace and other websites, but the person familiar with the situation said Google was primarily motivated by the opportunity to add a team of about 100 developers who have experience in the social-networking arena.
“At Slide, we have been concentrating on building online communities that foster self-expression, creativity, and engagement across multiple platforms,” Slide founder Max Levchin said in a statement. “Given our harmonize vision and values, this is a tremendous opportunity for two companies to come together to change the way people socialize on the Web.”
San Francisco based Slide, which was founded in 2005, has created a number of apps that are popular on social-networking sites like Facebook, including SuperPoke Pets, Top Fish, SPP Ranch, and SuperPocus Academy of Magic. It has more than 27 million unique users per month in over 200 countries, according to its Web site.
“We are co-ordinating 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,” the post by Glazer read. “Slide has already developed compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we have already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine titan Google has long battled to find the right touch in creating the types of social networking services that have become increasingly popular online activities for consumers. This deal is part of a renewed thrust by Google to offer people an alternate ways to interact with Google products across the Web, an effort which Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra has been assigned to oversee, the person said.
Google is facing increasing pressure to bolster its social-networking appeal to counter Facebook, which recently topped more than 500 million users and is aggressively moving to develop its advertising business.
Slide has roughly 120 employees. Almost all are expected to join Google as part of the acquisition.
Google, has acquired around 22 companies during the first six months of 2010, according to the company’s most up-to-date quarterly filing with the SEC. Google did not disclose financial terms.