Google has agreed to buy Slide for $182 million in a deal that will be announced Friday. According to TechCrunch, this is only one piece of the puzzle in Google making moves to create a “serious social gaming and apps strategy to counter Facebook.”
Slide is one of the pioneers of social gaming on sites like Facebook and MySpace. You haven’t heard of them because their limited success was overshadowed by companies like Zynga and Playdom. Playdom was recently acquired by Disney. Zynga has been making serious moves, inking a five year deal with Facebook, partnering with Yahoo, and accepting a $200 million investment from Google (not Google Ventures, Google proper). Besides the fact that Google dropped $200 mil on a competitor before looking to acquire Slide, some are scratching their heads about the rumored deal:
Now, I’m happy for Max Levchin and his investors, but frankly, the deal shows that Google not only has no idea what to do about social, but actually lacks the imagination to even think of anything worthwhile on its own. If Google is really trying to go social and get on the social gaming bandwagon, this deal is comparable to buying a Kia and hoping it can help you race past a Mercedes AMG 65 on the Autobahn. via GigaOM
Om sites a comment from Josh Elman (formerly of Facebook), who attempts to explain why Zynga and Playdom met success while Slide and RockYou fell by the wayside. The answer is that Zynga focused on one thing: games. They were fully invested in leveraging social gaming into a business. Slide and RockYou attempted to capitalize on whatever was hot at the time rather than building something sustainable.
Given the current state of Google services, they do appear erratic. Most deem Orkut a failure. Google Buzz had it pretty rough because of its ties into Gmail and the privacy complaints that ensued. Now, nobody even talks about it. It is also rumored that this deal was spearheaded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who also championed Google Buzz and Google Wave, the latter of which is no longer being developed and may close by the end of the year.
Does Google have some master plan when it comes to social networking? Are they desperately seeking a solution? Are they simply experimenting because they have the resources to do so? What do you think?