Google confirms acquisition of Slide

Slide develops games for social networking sites

Google has officially acquired Slide, a company specialising in games and applications for social networking sites.

The search firm has failed to get much of a hold in the social networking market, after the lukewarm reception of Google Buzz and the failure of Google Wave.

The purchase of Slide appears to be designed as another way for people to connect with friends and colleagues.

"The web is about people, and we are working to develop open, transparent, 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," said David Glazer, an engineering director at Google, in a blog post.

Slide has already connected "tens of millions" of people across many platforms, according to Glazer, and could form part of other Google services, including 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," he said.

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

Slide chief executive Max Levchin added that the deal is "a tremendous opportunity for the two companies to come together to change the way people socialise on the web".