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Google's Long History of Forays into Social Media

Googles LONG HISTORY OF FORAYS SOCIAL MEDIA Feb. 17, 2003 Google buys Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, for an undisclosed amount. Late 2003 Friendster management receives a $30 million buyout offer from Google, which they decline. But in January 10, 2007 Friendster announces they will partner with Google, and the search giant will power Friendster's search and text ads, just as it does on MySpace. January 24, 2004 Google launches Orkut, an independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten. The community membership was originally by invitation only. The two-year deal and financials weren't disclosed. But since Friendster reports less than 1 million monthly unique visitors, the agreement won't be on the same scale as the $900 million Google-MySpace deal. "Orkut is an online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating. Its social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people you've never met before," says Google. April 1, 2004 Gmail launches as an invitation-only beta release, and becomes open to everyone February 14, 2007. As of July 2010, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 65th in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. May 11, 2005 Google acquires Dodgeball and discontinued it in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software provider for mobile devices. Users text their location to the service, August 24, 2005 Google Talk beta launches. It let users talk or IM using a computer microphone and speakers for free. which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby. talk October 7, 2005 Google releases Google Reader through Google Labs. It's a web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. Items in Google Reader can be shared with other web users. In the early years this was done by sending links via e-mail, or by creating a basic webpage that includes all shared items from an account. In December 2007 the sharing policy changed so that shared items were automatically visible to Google Talk contacts. February 7, 2006 Chat in Gmail is released using a built-in XMPP client. March 9, 2006 writely Google buys Writely, a web-based word processing application that will go on to be be the basis for the shareable in the cloud April 1, 2006 Google announces "Google Romance, 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." Sadly, it was an April Fool's Day Joke. word processing service Google Docs. June 13, 2006 Google announces Picasa Web Albums - a software application for organizing and editing digital photos. "We wanted to make sure you can keep enjoying the photos your friends have shared with you," says Google. "With this in mind, when viewing others' galleries, you can download an entire album of photos directly into Picasa with just a couple of clicks. For uploading and downloading to and from Picasa Web Albums, you'll need the new version of Picasa - again, it's only available to invited users for the time being." October 9, 2006 Google announces the acquisition of YouTube, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the sale Google allowsYouTube to keep doing what they'd been doing to preserve their success as a brand and a community. Tube Feb. 17, 2007 Google Docs is made available to Google Apps users, and in January 2010 Docs would allow any file type, including 1GB of free space and $0.25/GB for additional storage. March 5, 2010 - DocVerse, an online document collaboration company, is acquired by Google. It allows multiple May 23, 2007 Google acquires Feedburner, an RSS user online collaboration on Microsoft Office compatible document formats such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. management company for around $100 million. July 2, 2007 Google acquires GrandCentral for an estimated $50 million - will be launched two years later as Google GrandCentral Voice. July 9, 2007 Google acquires Postini for $625million. Postini is "a company that offers security and corporate compliance solutions for email, IM, and other web-based communications," Google says. "Like Google Apps, Postini's services are entirely hosted, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software. A leader in its field, Postini serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users, and was one of our first partners Aug. 6, 2007 Google and MySpace reach a deal for Google to provide search and contextual ads to MySpace, in return for giving MySpace (and the entire Fox Interactive Media network) $900 million in guaranteed payments through 2010. for Google Apps. Their email and IM management services include inbound and outbound policy management, spam and virus protection, content filtering, message archiving, encryption, and more." Sept. 27, 2007 Google buys Zingku, a text messaging service. At this time, the Zingku service is in private beta. Oct. 9, 2007 Google acquires Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging service comparable to Twitter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. On January 14, 2009 it was announced that Google would be jaiku open-sourcing the product but would "no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase" leaving development to a "passionate volunteer team of Googlers." March 12, 2009 Jaiku was re-launched on Google's App Engine platform the source code to JaikuEngine was Nov. 1, 2007 Google announces OpenSocial, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIS) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. Based released. on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google Gadgets framework, OpenSocial includes four APIS for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks. March 25, 2008 Google, in partnership with Yahoo! and MySpace, announces they will form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications web. May 12, 2008 Google announces Friend Connect - an OpenSocial application with the main focus of trying to simplify the connection between social and across non-social website sand standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk, Netlog and other social networks. September 2, 2008 Picasa upgrade is released, making it easier to sync with the web and Picasa Web Albums is updated with a new feature allowing you to "name tag" people in photos. There is also an "Explore" page that allows you to browse public content, including "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa November 20, 2008 Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums. SearchWiki launches, a way to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Comments can also be read by other users. February 5, 2009 Google Latitude replaces Dogeball as a location-aware mobile app. It allows a mobile phone user to allow certain people to track their location. Via their own Google Account, the user's cell phone location is mapped on Google Maps. The user can control the accuracy and details of what each of the other users can see - an exact location can be allowed, or it can be limited to identifying the city only. Users have to explicitly opt in to Latitude, and may only see the March 11, 2009 Google Voice is launched - service provides a US phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. Inbound calls to this number are forwarded to other phone numbers of the subscriber. Outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations by dialing the Google Voice number or from a web-based application. location of friends who have decided to share their location. March 27, 2009 Google Wave is announced. It's a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. Initially released only to developers, a preview Feb. 9, 2010 release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, Google launches Google Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool from Google, designed to integrate into Gmail, can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's each allowed to invite additional users. On May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public. Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document", are inbox. hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. During the initial launch of Google Wave, invitations were a hot commodity, even being sold on eBay. Feb. 1, 2010 Google acquires Aardvark, a San Francisco Internet search/social networking site for an estimated $50 million. Aardvark, which counts two ex-Google employees among its founders, has pioneered a new type of Internet search dubbed "social search." Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark's service taps a person's network of social By Stephanie Marcus and Zachary Sniderman MASHABLE.com contacts. illustrated by @shanesnow

Google's Long History of Forays into Social Media

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This infographic provides a timeline with a brief description of each time that Google attempted to grow it's social media market by company acquisition, social media app creation, and through deals w...

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