Google’s Official “We Bought Slide” Announcement – Where’s The Buzz?

As we have previously reported, Google has purchased social gaming company Slide. The move was seen by many as Google forcing its nose into a quickly growing section of the internet that the giant would be remiss if it did not own at least a part of.

The full Google announcement:

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.

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.

While we don’t have any detailed product plans to share right now, we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google, and we can’t wait to work together to give people more and better tools to communicate and connect.

Posted by David Glazer, Engineering Director

And there you have it folks, from rumor to execution to confirmation. Let’s hope that Slide fits into Google’s culture.

As a side note, Google called the announcement “Google and Slide: building a more social web,” which is a nice title. This social web, does it include Buzz? We have heard little news from Google about its new social system, and this would have been an excellent moment to announce a link-up between Slide and Buzz. Google does mention in the announcement a number of products with ‘social elements’ such as Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. But no Buzz.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

For now, Google doesn’t mind saying ‘social’ in public with Buzz in the closet.