News that Google had bought Slide came earlier this week, but with little detail other than the $182 million pricetag. This morning, both Google and Slide posted official announcements on the deal, offering a few more details on what to expect.
There has been increasing buzz lately over Google’s potential challenge in the social networking sphere, with rumors of a Google Me in the works, and the Slide acquisition only feeds the flames.
According to Google’s announcement, the company won’t be offering any detailed product plans quite yet, but does say that Slide CEO Max Levchin and team will be joining on with the search giant.
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.
Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. 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.
A similar statement is provided on Slide, saying that “this is a tremendous opportunity for the two companies to come together to change the way people socialize on the web”.
If Google is working to make a Facebook alternative, as so many have suggested, then we can only expect to see a wide integration among its many products, as indicated in today’s release. While little detail is offered, that seems to be the take-away from today’s announcement – Google will go social across its many services, not just one. Hopefully this time, however, it takes into consideration those privacy concerns and does some testing, lest we have another Buzz launch on our hands.
