PC Mag
Google has acquired Slide, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of social apps for sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Google's own Orkut. While both companies have yet to acknowledge the acquisition, The New York Times has reportedly confirmed the story, which was first broken by the TechCrunch blog.
According to two sources at The Times, Google will pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $228 million for Slide, the company behind such family-friend apps as SuperPoke, FunSpace, Top Friends, and Rock Riot.
The acquisition seems to reinforce a recent series of rumors surrounding the creation of a Google-owned casual gaming site that blogs are currently referring to as "Google Games." While also has yet to confirm the creation of such a site, CEO Eric Schmidt came fairly close in a recent interview, stating, "We have understood for a long time that social stuff is very important. The question that's in everyone's minds is why are we trying to create a competitor to Facebook, and the answer is we're not going to create a competitor to Facebook. It's something different."
Google has also reportedly invested $150 million in Zynga, the company behind such uber successful social gaming titles as Mafia War and Farmville.
Whether the investment in such gaming companies would play a major role in the creation of the rumored Google social network, Google Me, also has yet to be seen.
