14 DAY TRIAL // Google has confirmed the Slide acquisition, reported earlier this week. The social gaming and app maker has been acquired as Google is building up its ‘social’ game to take Facebook head-on. Google makes the reason rather obvious in the announcement, even though it doesn’t go as far as saying that it doesn’t ‘get’ social and needs outside help.
“We’re excited to announce we’ve acquired Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online,” David Glazer, Engineering Director at Google, writes.
“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,” he adds.
The fact is, the web, for Google, is not about people. Google is a company built and ran by engineers. That’s great when you’re building a search engine that has to deal with massive amounts of data and then process and make sense of it, Google Search’s success is testament to that. But it’s not so great when you’re trying to understand people and not data, Google’s string of failures in that department are a testament to that as well.
As Facebook has become the single largest threat to Google, the company is doubling down on efforts to counter it. It is known that Google is working on a social network and, while Google won’t admit it directly, it has more or less said that it is working on something, something that isn’t “another Facebook,” whatever that means.
Slide has functioned somewhat as a roller-coaster. It started off strong and was valued at one point at $500 million. But as the company failed to generate revenue from its early success on Facebook and as others, like Zynga, quickly became much bigger on the social network, Google is said to have paid only about $182 million for the company.