Here are Google's Social Media prospect. :) Amazing.. Google is world's number site as compared to traffic.
- February 17, 2003 : Google bys Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, for an undisclosed amount. (Then after blogger is so famous and now a days trending one)
- Late 2003: Friendster management receive $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. The two year deal and financial 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.
- January 24, 2004 : Google launches Orkut, an independent project of Orkut. The community's membership was originally by invitation only.
- April 1, 2004: Gmail launches an invitation only beta release, and become open to everyone February 14, 2007.
- 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, which the notifies them of crushes, friends, friends's friend interesting venues nearby.
- August 24, 2005 : Google Talk beta launches. It let users talk or IM using a comouter microphone and speakers for free
- October 7, 2005 : Google releases Google Reader through Google Labs. It's web based aggregator capable or reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline
- February 7, 2006: Chat in Gmail is released using a built in XMPP client.
- March 9, 2006 : Google buys Writely, a web based word processing application that will go on to be the basis for the share-able, in the cloud word processing service Google Docs.
- April 1, 2006 : Google announces "Google Romance, a new product that offers users both a psycho-graphic 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.
- 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 other's 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's new version."
- October 9, 2006 : Google announces the acquisition of You Tube 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.
- February 17, 2007 : Google Docs is made available to Google Apps users, and in January 2010 Docs would allow any file type, including 1 GB 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 user online collaboration on Microsoft Office compatible document formats such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
- May 23, 2007 : Google acquires Feedburner, an RSS management company for around $100 million.
- July 2, 2007: Google acquires Grand Central for an estimated $50 million- will be launched two years later as Google 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.
- 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.
- September 27, 2007 : Google buys Zingku, a text messaging service. At this time, the Zingku service is in private beta.
- October 9, 2007 : Google acquire Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging service comparable to Twitter.
- November 1, 2007 : Developed by Google, in partnership with MySpace and a number of other social network, OpenSocial is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web Based social network applications.
- September 2, 2008: A Picasa upgraded releases, making it easier to sync with the web and the Picasa Web Album is updated with new features.
- November 20, 2008: SearchWiki launches, a way to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on search results.
- February 5, 2009: Google latitude replaced Dogeball as a location-aware mobile app.
- March 11, 2009 : Google voice is launched. The service provide US phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected ares codes.
- March 27, 2009 : Google wave is announced. It's a web based service, as well as computing platform, and communications protocols.
- February 1, 2010 : Google acquires Aardvark, an internet search/social networking site for an estimated $50 million.
- February 9, 2010: Google launches Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool from Google, designed to integrate with Gmail.
- June 28, 2011 : Google+, invitation-only starts.
- Later August/September 2011: Google + service has been started.
And much more to go. Just wait and watch, what's google's next invention.
