30 Google Ventures Into Social Media

Acquisition of Pyra Labs on February 17, 2003

Blogger push button Web publishing platform is bought by Google for an undisclosed amount believed to be an all cash transaction.

Google tries to buy Friendster at the end of 2003

Friendster turns down Googles $30 million buyout offer, but they finally strike a deal with Google in January, 2007. Google now powers Friendsters contextual ads.

Orkut is launches on January 24, 2004

Orkut named after its creator Orkut Bykkkten is launched. Orkut is social networking portal that offers features that one would expect from a social networking site: share, connect, chat comment, talk, control privacy settings. Initial traffic distribution had 50% of traffic coming from USA, and today most traffic comes from India and Brazil.

Gmail beta launches on April 1, 2004

Gmail beta launches as invitation only beta release. On February 14, 2007 it becomes open to the general public.

Dodgeball is acquires by Google on May 11, 2005

Dodgeball was a company that produced a location-based social networking application for mobile devices. Users could text their location to the service provider and get relevant information about their location or venue. Dodgeball is succeeded by Google Latitude in 2009.

Google Talk beta launches on August 24, 2005

Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application that enables you to talk or IM with friends quickly and easily, as well as talk using a computer microphone and speaker (no phone required) for free.

Google Reader is released through Google Labs on October 7, 2005

Google Reader is a web based application that understands Atom and RSS feeds. Users can read the feeds while on-line or off. Users can share their feeds with others. This greatly simplifies things, especially if users want to share a lot of their feed links.

Gmail chat is released on February 7, 2006

Users can now chat without leaving their Gmail web page using the built in XMPP client. XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol and is supported by big guys such as Google, Cisco, HP and others.

Writely is acquired by Google on March 9, 2006

Writely was a web platform for sharing and editing documents from anywhere in the world through the web browser. Today Writely code base is integrated into Google in the form of Google Docs.

Google Romance is announced on April 1, 2006

a new product that offers users both a psychographic matchmaking service and all-expenses-paid dates for couples who agree to experience contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of their evening.

This is just a hoax following the tradition that Google established way back on April 1st in 2000 with Google MentalPlex (Google reads you mind, and visualizes relevant search results).

Picasa Web Albums is announced on June 13, 2006

Picasa Web Albums is an add-on for the Picasa desktop photo management software that lets users upload any number of photos (no more browsing for an individual photo from a web form).

Google acquires YouTube October 9, 2006

Google buys YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars.

Google Docs is released on February 17, 2007

Google Docs is made available through Google Apps. Users can share, edit and manage their documents on-line.

Feedburner is acquired by Google on May 23, 2007

RSS management company Feedburner, is bought for about 100 million dollars.

Google buys GrandCentral on July 2, 2007

GrandCentral is web based Internet telephony platform, that is most notable for the possibility of using a computer to call a land-line or a mobile phone. Also users can pick a single on-line number and route all their existing phone numbers through it.

Google buys Postini on July 9, 2007

Postini offers a security and corporate compliance for email, instant messages, and other web based communication. Google spends 625 million dollars in cash.

Google and MySpace reach an agreement on August 6, 2007

Google and MySpace reach a deal for Google to provide search and contextual advertisement to MySpace. Google has been paying 20 million a month for 45 months starting from August 2007. That totals to $900 million.

Google buys Zingku September 2, 2007

Zingku is a text messaging service. At this time Google is working on Zingku somewhere in an underground bunker.

Google acquires Jaiku on October 9, 2007

Jaiku is a micro-blogging service akin to Twitter.

OpenSocial is released on November 1, 2007

Developed with MySpace and many other social networking sites. OpenSocial Offers a unified Application Programming Interface (API) for different social networking platforms, so that developers dont have to rely on site specific API. Some of the sites that support open social: hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo! and many others, except Facebook.

Open Social Foundation is announced on March 25, 2008

Google in partnership with Yahoo! and MySpace annouce the formation of the Open Social Foundation. This is of course to try and create a standard that would be competitive enough agaist Facebook API.

Friend Connect appears on May 12, 2008

Friend connect is an OpenSocial App that allows easy connections between users of different social networking websites and even those who are not on any social network yet. Another step in unifying the user base to have a standing chance against Facebook.

Google Lively appears on July 8, 2008

This experimental service lasted about 6 month and was similar to SecondLife.

Picasa upgrade September 2, 2008

Picasa now allows you to name tag people in photos (sounds familiar?), among other improvements.

SearchWiki launches on November 20, 2008

SearchWiki allows you to chnage search result positions, add, delete and comment on your results. Comments can be seen by other users of SearchWiki.

Google Latitude replaces Dodgeball on February 5, 2009

Google Latitude is an application for a mobila phone or computer that lets lets users tag their current location and share that location with their friends. Google Latitude connects through Google Account and uses Google Maps for tagging.

Google Voice launches on March 11, 2009

Based on GrandCentral, Googler Voice allows to have one online phone number that can be connected to all your other numbers. You can choose who comes through and on which phones they are heard. Cheaper international calling than Skype, and free calling on any US based phone number at least intil the end of 2010. The quality is worse than that of Skype. I myself prefer Skype for calling from Boston to Paris.

Google Wave is announced on March 27, 2009

Google Wave is a communication and collaboration platform based on hosted conversations, called waves. A wave comprises a set of concurrently editable structured documents and supports real-time sharing between multiple participants.

Google Wave uses the same protocol as Gmail chat, with an addon to the XMPP core. It seems that Google set very high expectations for Google Wave that for some reason did not come to fruition.

Google acquires Aardvark on February 1, 2010

Aardvark is social search: ask any question and Aardvark will discover the perfect person in your network to answer in minutes.

Google spends about 50 million dollars.

Google launches Google Buzz on February 9, 2010

A Gmail integrated social media service Google Buzz allows to sharealost any kind of media with your existing Gmail contacts.

RIP Google Wave Hello Google Me

The rise and fall of Google Wave is nothing short of some Greek mythological epic. In the initial stages Google Wave was by invitation only and it seemed that everybody wanted one; invitations were even sold on eBay. Back in August of 2010 Googleannounced that it no longer will support Google Wave development after the end of 2010 because the service did not fullfil their expectations. In other words not enough users found useful applications of Google Wave for their everyday needs.

Google has always been open about its desire to organize and to make the noise that is created by social interaction on the web relevant. In light of this a lot of people seem to think that Google ahs another big project up their sleeve: Google me. As of this writing this project is in the rumor stage, but some influential people at Facebook are sure that it is a real project that will emerge pretty soon.

Competition is always good, I just hope there will a good gentlemanly competition of social networks in the near future. At this point even Google cant seem to budge Facebooks firm grip on the social network.

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