Google makes yet another social networking buy

Google has added another firm to its growing list of acquisitions in the social networking space with the purchase of Palo Alto start-up Ångströ.

Ångströ makes apps designed to enhance social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter by "unlocking the power of your social graph".

One such example is Noteworthy News, which was launched in beta earlier this month. The app "delivers news about people and companies in your professional network", according to the firm.

Co-founder Rohit Khare announced the acquisition in a blog post entitled 'Our work here is done…'

"Almost four years ago I set out to solve a deceptively simple problem: 95 per cent of the Google Alerts I received about the entrepreneur Adam Rifkin were about the Hollywood movie director instead," he said.

"With the help of investors like CommerceNet and advisors such as Avery Lyford, our team shipped apps to discover hot new photos on Facebook, improve Caller ID by using LinkedIn profiles, adding style and links to Twitter, create a real-time social address book, and a slew of other services (some of which are open source)."

The purchase will be the fourth in the social networking and e-commerce space by Google this month. First up was social networking app maker Slide, then came virtual currency firm Jambool and finally visual search engine Like.com.

However, Google has struggled to find success with its social networking services in the past, most notably with Google Buzz which was widely criticised for violating user privacy.