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    Mg Siegler
    August 27th, 2011

    Hell Hath No Fury Like A SuperPoke Pets Player Scorned

    Screen Shot 2011-08-27 at 7.35.05 PM

    This past Thursday, Google decided they had had enough of their Slide experiment. Even though it had only been a year since they spent $200 million+ on the social apps startup, they brought the hammer down, killing all but one Slide product (Prizes.org). The casualty list included Slide projects both new and old. And that sucks for apps like Photovine which just launched last week. But one Slide… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    August 25th, 2011

    Bloody Thursday: Google Deadpools All Slide Products Except One

    google-slide-zurich-copy

    Because we needed more big tech news this week. Yes, it’s true that Google has just brought the hammer down on Slide, as Liz Gannes of AllThingsD first reported earlier this evening. Yes, it’s also true that Max Levchin is leaving. Now we also know the fate of all of the Slide products. And it’s not pretty.

    All of them are being discontinued — except one, we’ve learned. This means both the… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    August 17th, 2011

    Photovine Grows Ready For Public Use; Easily Google’s Most Ambitious Photo-Sharing App Yet

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    Google’s Slide team has been busy. In the past few months, they’ve unleashed a range of social apps meant to fulfill different needs. But the strange thing is that Google hasn’t done a thing to promote any of them. That has been on purpose. Google is giving the Slide team, which operates on its own within Google, room to maneuver and fly under the radar. But with Photovine, they’re actually… → Read More

    Alexia Tsotsis
    July 22nd, 2011

    VideoInbox, Another Google/Slide Production, Brings Viral Videos To Your Inbox

    Screen shot 2011-07-22 at 7.40.10 PM

    We’ve come across the latest in Slide’s series of projects developed within Google, VideoInbox – a combination daily newsletter/Facebook app that basically centers around the viewing, sharing and cataloguing of viral videos (proof that it’s from Slide here). Sign up for VideoInbox with Facebook Connect and you’ll get a daily email with “hand selected” viral YouTube videos like “Slow Loris With… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    July 3rd, 2011

    The Google/Slide Quiet Launches Continue With Prizes — Social Contests For Money

    The Slide group within Google has been busy. Disco, the group messaging app, quietly launched back in March. Then last week, Pool Party, a group mobile photo service entered into private beta. And today the team is back again with Prizes, a service that apparently aims to link up people with a problem to those with a solution — for money.

    Found at Prizes.org (which DotWeekly reported that… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    June 30th, 2011

    Pool Party: Google Has Their Own Secret Photo-Sharing App Too — Built By Slide

    Back in March, we first exposed Disco, a group messaging app that the Slide team within Google had built. And that’s not all they’ve been working on. Say hello to Pool Party, another secret project by the same team within Google.

    We don’t know much about Pool Party other than it’s a photo-sharing app that the Slide team has built. The emphasis is said to be on creating group albums (“pools”) that… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    May 23rd, 2011

    Disco, Google's Secret Group Messaging App, Gets Pushy With Version 2.0

    Google seems to be going out of their way not to promote Disco, the group messaging app built by Google’s Slide team. When we first revealed the existence of the iPhone app and website (at disco.com) in March, Google wouldn’t comment on it. A few weeks ago, they released an Android version of the app as well. Was it touted on a Google blog anywhere? Nope. And yesterday brought version 2.0 of the… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    March 25th, 2011

    First Look: With Disco, Google Also Joins The Group Messaging Dance (Care Of Slide)

    As we just broke the news on, Google has a secret group messaging project that was built from within their confines: Disco. Slide, which Google bought last year, are the ones responsible for the app. And since word is that they’re allowed to run autonomously within the company as their own startup of sorts, the app probably doesn’t have anything to do with Google’s broader social strategy.

    Still… → Read More

    Alexia Tsotsis
    March 25th, 2011

    Meet 'Disco', The Group Texting App Built Secretly Inside Google

    It seems like Google has made a foray into the group messaging space today with Disco, a new iPhone app and website. Well, they sort of have.

    The service utilizes the Disco.com domain that Google bought at Domainfest last year for $255K. The Disco.com site went up today and the beta app hit the App Store yesterday, but no one noticed it — until now. And here’s the thing: it was made by Slide. → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    March 1st, 2011

    A Mobile Photo Sharing Casualty, Treehouse Hits The Deadpool; Founder Off To Google

    In terms of hot spaces at the moment, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything hotter than the mobile photo sharing space. Instagram, PicPlz, and Path all have gotten huge amounts of funding recently. And the latter even turned down a massive $100 million+ offer from Google. So the space is just minting money and everyone is riding high, right? Well, not exactly.

    It can be easy to forget that… → Read More

    Mg Siegler
    January 5th, 2011

    Hitpost Aims To Score With Couch-Loving, Smartphone-Wielding Sports Fanatics

    Many startups arise when someone notices a lot of people doing the same thing in a disorganized or sort of convoluted way. One example is how Foodspotting came about because so many people were using services like Twitter to share pictures of what food they were eating. In a similar vein, Aaron Krane noticed that a lot of people were sharing pictures of their favorite sports moments as they watch… → Read More

    Sarah Lacy
    December 17th, 2010

    Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees: Autonomous Business Units

    There’s a lie that companies and entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to commit to an acquisition.

    Oh, we’re not going to change anything! We’re just going to give you more resources to do what you’ve been doing even better!

    Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things?

    It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy– whether it’s HR, politics or just… → Read More

    Sarah Lacy
    September 9th, 2010

    Trying to Be Something You're Not: Works for Drag Queens, not for Google

    Contrary to popular opinion, the reason Yahoo’s metrics have been stagnant and its stock has lost half its value in the last two-and-a-half years isn’t because Google did search better than Yahoo. It’s because Yahoo turned its back on what it did well: Building the first online mass media content superstore. In doing so, it let the younger, sexier, faster-growing Google define what Yahoo … → Read More

    Leena Rao
    August 8th, 2010

    What Games, Places, Music And News Could Mean For Google Checkout

    While Google’s payment system, Google Checkout, is not a giant in the online payments space, it is certainly not a failure, especially when compared to some of Google’s other product extensions. Launched in 2006, Google Checkout allows users to pay for an item using a preset log-in, similar to PayPal or Amazon Payments. The company claims that “hundreds of thousands” of merchants currently use… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    August 6th, 2010

    Google Confirms Slide Acquisition, Gears Up For War With Facebook

    Google is finally officially confirming that it bought Slide, a deal we first reported two days ago. Google did not disclose a price, but according to a source close to the deal it was $182 million. (With earnouts, it might turn out to be a bit more, but you can never count on earnouts).

    We also conveniently broke down what everybody made from the deal. Founder Max Levchin got $39 million… → Read More

    John Biggs
    June 10th, 2010

    Review: T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide

    Short Version: A long, long time ago, I can still remember, how the MyTouch 3G’s touchscreen used to make me cry. And I knew that if they had their chance, that T-Mobile could add a keyboard, and maybe we’d be happy for a while. And how May/June made me shiver because T-Mobile has delivered – a MyTouch with a keyboard as useful as a Sidekick’s. → Read More

    Sarah Lacy
    June 8th, 2010

    Web 2.0 to China: Ok, Let’s Try This Again…

    Yesterday, I had lunch with one of the top people in the Chinese Internet scene who said, “We have a saying here, ‘Internet multinationals all fail in China, Google was just the last one to go.’”

    As sayings go, that’s not especially catchy. But it is devastating. And true even if you count Google’s recent actions as a China morally-based forfeit. The stark truth is there are… → Read More

    Jason Kincaid
    April 20th, 2010

    Social Gaming Execs Discuss Growth, Monetization, And The Future Of Facebook Games

    Today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, a panel of top social gaming executives met to discuss the future of gaming on Facebook. The conversation touched on quite a few issues, including the evolution of social gaming mechanics, monetization, and whether or not the industry would be able to continue its incredible growth over the next few years. One bold prediction: Playdom… → Read More

    Jason Kincaid
    March 4th, 2010

    Slide Lays Off 10% Of Staff, Shutters Short-Lived Games 'SuperPocus' And 'Top Fish'

    Slide, the online entertainment company founded by Max Levchin (who we just interviewed in Davos), has decided to stop development on two of its social games, Slide SuperPocus and Top Fish, and will be laying off “less than 10%” of its employees in the process. The company had around 40 employees working on the two games, some of whom will be reassigned to work on other projects. Prior to the… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    February 8th, 2010

    Win A Mentoring Session With Founders Of Digg, Flickr, Mint, Ning, Slide Or Zynga

    Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).

    The raffle will take place at a private… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    February 1st, 2010

    Davos Interviews: Max Levchin Says Slide Now Makes Almost All Of Its Money From Virtual Goods

    Continuing his series of Davos interviews, Michael talks to Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin in the video above. Levchin discusses the ” shift from advertising to virtual goods” and reveals that most of Slide’s revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that… → Read More

    Leena Rao
    June 19th, 2009

    Widgetizing The Web: Widgetbox Hits 500 Million Impressions A Month

    Widgets were all the rage last year. And the trend seems to be growing. Widgetbox, a widget creation and distribution platform, is reporting 500 million impressions worldwide in the past month, according to Quantcast. Widgetbox says that the vast majority of activity exists across hundreds of thousands of publishers who embed the widgets in blogs each month and through partners who integrate… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    November 7th, 2008

    The Platforms: Google, Microsoft, Facebook And MySpace

    Slide founder Max Levchin just kicked off a panel called “The Platform Advantage” at the Web 2.0 Summit. Participants include Google’s Vic Gundotra, Microsoft’s David Treadwell, MySpace’s Amit Kapur and Facebook’s Elliot Schrage.

    The panel began with a general debate on exactly what a platform is, and how each of the companies play in the space. Kapur says a platform has to create an ecosystem… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    July 23rd, 2008

    Max Levchin To Facebook: Developers Need More Certainty (And A Payment System Would be Nice Too)

    Slide was not too happy when Facebook temporarily pulled one of its most popular applications, Top Friends, from the social networking site for exposing too much profile information to people who were not friends. Ahead of today’s F8 developer conference, I asked Slide CEO Max Levchin what Facebook could do to make developers’ lives easier. Not surprisingly, he’d like to see… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    July 7th, 2008

    Facebook Continues War On App Developers. This Week: Super Wall

    Facebook is continuing its war on Facebook apps that push the limits on acceptable user interaction. Last week it was Slide’s Top Friends App, which it briefly suspended. Later Facebook also suspended another popular app, Social Me. This time they’re targeting Slide’s rival RockYou and their Super Wall application, which tends to have a lot of spammy user content. But instead of… → Read More

    Jason Kincaid
    June 30th, 2008

    Slide And Vh1 Team Up To Annoy The Hell Out Of You

    Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    June 26th, 2008

    Did Facebook Shut Down Slide's Top Friends? How Very MySpace Of Them

    MySpace used to be notorious for simply banning third party widgets that didn’t play nice (“not playing nice” generally meant any kind of advertisements in the widgets, but it was very arbitrary). Those days are long gone. Maybe now, though, Facebook is having a go at it. Until now Facebook combated black hat applications by just tightening up the rules to shut down loopholes. → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    June 9th, 2008

    Slide Got Theirs, Now RockYou Gets Some Too

    Back in January Slide pulled off a whopper of a financing for an effectively pre-revenue startup: $50 million, valuing the company at a cool half billion dollars. Not bad. No one was surprised to hear that arch-rival RockYou would soon close a big round of their own. And we have not been dissapointed. Today RockYou is announcing a $35 million Series C round, led by DCM. Previous investors include… → Read More

    Mark Hendrickson
    June 4th, 2008

    Slide Opens Sales Office in New York, Seeks to Justify Huge Valuation

    Slide is a peculiar Web 2.0 company. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is founder Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and has been profiled as a workaholic by the New York Times. Its operations themselves aren’t terribly fascinating: they consist of cranking out fun, but trivial, widgets and social network applications for the likes of Facebook and MySpace. But whether its products… → Read More

    Jason Kincaid
    April 30th, 2008

    Watercooler's SN Apps for Fans Backed by $4M

    Meet Watercooler, a startup developing social network applications for all the usual suspects – Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster – that allow fans to rally around their favorite sports teams and TV shows. The Mountain View-based firm raised a previously undisclosed $4M in Series A funding from Canaan Partners this past September. While it’s been developing Facebook… → Read More

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