Google's History of Social Media

Google LONG HISTORY OF FORAYS SOCIAL MEDIA February 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's 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 likely isn't 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, which it discontinued 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, talk friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby. 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 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 allows YouTube to keep doing what they'd been doing to preserve their success as a brand and a community. Tube February 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 management company for around $100 million. user online collaboration on Microsoft Office compatible document formats such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 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 $625 million. 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 August 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." September 27, 2007 Google buys Zingku, a text messaging service. At this time, the Zingku service is in private beta. October 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 jalku 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 November 1, 2007 Developed by Google, in partnership with MySpace and a number of other social networks, OpenSocial is a set of application programming interfaces (APIS) for web-based social network applications. According to Google, "OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. released. 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 Friend Connect is an OpenSocial app with the goal of trying to simplify the connections between social and across non-social websites, and also standardize the handling of social applications and content. It's a free app and requires no previous programming knowledge and allows websites to offer social applications and content from Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk, Netlog and other social networks. July 8, 2008 Google Lively was a short lived venture September 2, 2008 A Picasa upgrade is released, making it easier to sync with the that launched July 8, 2008 and was discontinued six months later. According to Google, it was "an experiment in providing people with more ways to express themselves on the web." As an attempt at their own version of Second Life, Lively's users were able to create social areas like bars, cafes, bedrooms or 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 pub "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums. even tropical islands, which they were able to share with other users, and they could also chat with one another using customized avatars. conte November 20, 2008 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 replaced Dogeball as a location-aware mobile app. Through user's Google Account, it allows cell phone users to let their friends know their locations via Google Maps. The user can control the accuracy and details of just what other users can see. They can choose an exact address, or limited it to larger area like which city they're in. March 11, 2009 Google Voice is launched. The 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. March 27, 2009 Google Wave is announced. It's a web-based service, as well as a computing platform, and communications protocol meant to combine e-mail, IMing, wikis, and social networking. While it was first released only to developers, the preview release was extended to 100,000 users in February 1, 2010 Google acquires Aardvark, an 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 September 2009 and also allowed users to invite their friends. On May 19, 2009 Wave was released to the general public. Waves, described by Google as "equal parts conversation and document, that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. The fact that Wave never really caught on is surprising since during the initial launch, invitations were considered a hot commodity, and were even sold on eBay. 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 hosted XML documents contacts. February 9, 2010 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 By Stephanie Marcus and Zachary Sniderman "conversations" and visible in the user's MASHABLE.com inbox. illustrated by @shanesnow social-catalog.com