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 app termination above all others has people really up in arms: SuperPoke! Pets. How do I know? The comment section on TechCrunch.

If you look at our post about the Google killing Slide from Thursday, you’ll find 230+ comments right now. In the Facebook comments era of TechCrunch, this is a ton. In our pre-Facebook comments era this would probably equate to over 1,000 comments. And nearly every single one of these comments is in response to the killing of SuperPoke! Pets.

Google, you just pissed off the wrong group of casual gamers. And yes, nearly every single one of them seems to be a woman. That’s why I have to give the title of best comment (and credit for the headline of this post) to Annette Samford for the following gem:

Hell hath no fury like a SPP player scorned. Shame on you Google. You could have sent that 200 mil to the homeless and left the game alone. It’s not like any new developing was going on anyway. What was it costing you? Lame excuse for ditching a VERY popular and loved game by so many.

Samford’s comment also encapsulates many of the other comments. These players are really pissed off. I’ll paste a selection of the top comments below, because they do deserve a bigger audience — many of them clearly spent a lot of money on this game over the years. And they’re taking to the TechCrunch comment section because the official Slide post has no comment section.

Tonya Surbaugh:

People get to transfer photos but what about the LOYAL superpoke pets players? Not to mention all the $$$ spent on the game to see it go bye bye? GOOGLE + you say? I say hell to the NO!

Barbara Puder:

I started playing SuperPoke Pets because it was different from other games. It’s more social than any of the other games I’d played, and appealed more to to my creative side that the shoot-em-up or compete with other players type of games. Playing SPP is relaxing and fulfilling, without the time-crunch aspects of games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. (Really, Mafia Wars? We don’t have enough violence already?) I think it’s a huge mistake to eliminate this unique method of social and creative interaction. Please think very hard before pulling the plug, and reconsider what you could do with this game given the appropriate development and support.

Kitty Kurburski:

I too play Superpoke Pets and if you are taking it are you going to reimburse those of us who have spent money buying items for the game? This is a very sad day if you take our game. We love it.

Deborah Argerake:

Class action lawsuit requesting reimbursement for $$$ spent. Even after the slide team knew they were getting shut down, the promoted more sales. That seems a bit shady if not totally unethical. Could it be considered illegal? Any law student players out there want to bring this question to your professors?

Brianne Lane Baker:

I am very sad to see Superpoke! Pets go too! It’s the only game I have spent 2 years playing. I made lots of friends and loved how creative people could be with the game… never known another game that allows so much creativity.

Janice Hayes Scullenger:

this is the most hateful thing you could have done. millions of us on on this game. most people have disabilities and this is what they have. we have developed friendships. alot of people have spent tons on money on here. are you going to give them that back? but most of all you are taking away something that we have poured our heart and souls in. I have been on this game for over 3 years. I have some truly awesome people that I look forward to speaking to every day. I will drop all my google emails, change my servers and have over 3000 people on my yahoo account that will be more than happy to help me spread the word that google doesn’t care about the people that put faith in them. does google kick dogs and steal candy from babies too?

Lisa Morris Foster:

To say I am upset is an understatement! We all bought into you VIP for free from now on, after you stopped charging for gold. You knew that we would all spend the $$ to get it! I have invested thousands into this game. I think that I should be able to put that masterpiece I bought into my living room! Sell Slide to someone who might actually want to make some money and run it right, instead of running it into the ground! Google, you have let us all down! Make this right!

Michelle Strong:

WTF! Why did you buy Slide just to shut it down? I only play Superpoke Pets and I am not happy

Michelle Rustray Serrano:

I am so bummed..I must say I knew it was coming..SO my promise to YOU GOOGLE..I will NEVER use or buy a Google product EVER..YOU SUCK!

Jennifer Gyurkovic-Hagmann:

Hey Google! I expect a check in the mail for all of the gold items that I have in the SuperPoke Pets game. You do realize that people paid REAL MONEY for gold items, don’t you? If you do not make this right with all of the SPP players, I will never pay for anything Google ever again. I will also tell all who will listen what has happened here and how you care so little for the consumer!

Cathy Allaire:

IF YOU KILL OFF SUPERPOKE PETS, I WILL NOT EVER USE GOOGLE CHROME, GMAIL……NOT A SINGLE THING THAT YOU OWN…….SUPERPOKE PETS IS A GREAT GAME…..ALLOW US TO DOWNLOAD SUPERPOKE PETS TO OUR COMPUTER, SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO PLAY OUR GAME. WE HAVE SPENT ALOT OF MONEY ON THIS GAME, AND IT IS SO UNFAIR TO TAKE IT AWAY FROM US.

Irene Schleinkofer Pedrogo:

Are you Freakin kidding me! This is BullShit! I’ve spent Alot of MONEY on Superpoke Pets I think YOU should THINK of something else to do so I don’t Loose my GOLD ITEMS!

Lisa T Spp:

I’ve heard of suicide missions but this tops them all! If Google really does shut down SuperPoke Pets they might as well close their own doors at the same time. As for Max Levchin leaving to pursue other opportunities, I don’t think anyone here would ever support any endeavor he undertakes. I, like millions of other players invested a lot of money into Slide through the SPP game and I view this no differently than if I had invested money in any other company or any other commodity. I foresee a major class action suite in the works if this all goes down. So much joy turning into so much sadness.

Clarice’s TeeTee:

spp players……….. who would join together in a lawsuit to get our money back from the items we have purchased?

And, for some levity, Wayne Elgin:

Favorite part of this post? The Farmville moms trolling TC.

Your move, Google. A number of players are now threatening class-action lawsuits due to the money issue. We’ll see if they follow through on those threats, but this situation could be a bad one for Google — especially when you consider that they just launched their own casual games section on Google+.

Here’s a dumb question: why doesn’t Google just move SuperPoke! Pets over to the Google+ Games section? Clearly, it has a rabid fan base. In fact, why not just move all the Slide games over there?

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 Slide products before Google’s acquisition of the company a year ago, and the newer ones that the Slide team has been building within Google for the past year. Yes, it includes the newer products like Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, and the just-launched-last-week Photovine. They’re all dead.

The lone exception is Prizes.org (which we covered here), we’ve heard. The reason is that this was developed by the Slide team in China for Google, and they’ll keep pursuing it, apparently.

It was only last August that Google bought Slide for around $200 million after employee bonuses. The idea was to get more serious about social games, as well as to get proven entrepreneur Levchin on board. But a lot has changed in the past year — for one thing Eric Schmidt is no longer CEO. For another, Google now has Google+.

Slide had been running as a completely autonomous unit broken down into smaller teams within Google. For a while, that seemed like a good strategy that may keep Google nimble. Now it just looks kind of silly.

Slide was so autonomous that many were working on products that competed with features that were a part of Google+. And many of the apps created were iOS-first, and didn’t work at all on Google’s Android platform.

For their part, Google only has the following to say:

Max has decided to leave Slide and Google to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the best. Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities.

It’s also true that the Slide teams did not learn about this bloodbath until this afternoon. You can’t help but feel bad for these teams — especially the Photovine team which really did just launch their slick photo-sharing app a week ago. Unlike other Slide projects, Google even gave them so PR resources to get the word out about the app. Eight days later, dead.

Larry Page is apparently not messing around in his efforts to streamline Google as much as possible and trim any fat. While Google says that most Slide team members will stay at Google, I would not be surprised to see an exodus pretty quickly.

Update: Slide has just put up the following blog post to let customers know about the product terminations:

We wanted to give you all advance notice that in the coming months, a number of Slide’s products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide’s products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party. We created products with the goal of providing a fun way for people to connect, communicate and share. While we are incredibly grateful to our users and for all of the wonderful feedback over the years, many of these products are no longer as active or haven’t caught on as we originally hoped.

Most importantly, we wanted to take this opportunity to reassure you that we’re committed to helping our users preserve their data as easily as possible. We recognize that many of you have stored valuable content with us and want to assure you that, wherever possible, you will have ample time to download that information or transfer it to another service.

For example, on Slide.com, we will enable users to either download their photos or export them to a Picasa account. We are working to release this export feature over the coming weeks and, once added, users will have several months to take advantage of transferring their photos.

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 communicating a bit. And for good reason — the app is pretty slick.

If you’ve heard of Photovine before, it’s either because you read that Google registered the domain, or that they pushed the app into the App Store. But until now, the app has been in closed beta testing with a very limited number of users. Not anymore. As of now, the app is open for all to sign up.

So what is Photovine? It’s a photo-sharing application for iOS that puts an emphasis on “vines”. That is, photo-centric moments or ideas that connect you with other users. Yes, that sounds a bit pretentious. And the best way to understand it is to watch the video below. But think of it this way: you take a picture of your favorite cologne. This prompts another user to take a picture of their favorite fragrances. And that prompts another user to do the same. Etc. It’s more or less theme-based picture-taking.

This is an interesting concept because it spurs users into action. With an open-ended picture app you can take a picture of anything, and to some users, that’s daunting. What do you take a picture of when you can take a picture of anything? With Photovine, the experience is more guided. Or, if you wish to take a picture of anything, you can simply start your own vine.

In Google’s view, this amounts to storytelling with pictures. Maybe a picture tells the story of your “perfect weekend”. Someone else sees that and takes a picture to tell their own story of the same idea. Fundamentally, the idea stems from the staring up at the stars at night and wondering who else is doing the same thing? Point being, there are thousands, if not millions, of people around the world doing what you’re doing at the same time. Photovine’s goal is to connect those people.

If you’ve heard of the app Piictu, this is similar. But unlike so many Google products, Photovine is very well designed. In fact, it’s one of the more slick-looking iOS photo apps out there right now — again, just to be clear, technically Google-made.

Naturally, none of this ensures that app will find success. But it’s a compelling idea with a good user interface. It reminds me a bit of Treeshouse, a former Y Combinator-backed project — which shouldn’t be surprising at all considering that the founder of that startup, Chrys Bader, now works for Google/Slide on this project.

And yes, Photovine includes ways to share images out to Facebook or Twitter. But the actual social graph is their own.

You can find Photovine in the App Store here.

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 a Tiny Umbrella,” ”Rubik’s Cube Robot Is Smarter Than You” or “Bollywood Pizza Hut”.

Again exhibiting the autonomy we’ve now come to expect from the Google-owned Slide, the app uses, amazingly enough, the Facebook API to allow you to share videos with individual friends on Facebook or post them to your Facebook Wall.  While the button is there its Twitter OAuth aspect seems to be not yet implemented. The app also allows you to watch the top 5 viral videos from yesterday, as well as “Favorite” videos for watching later.

While VideoInbox is still very “work in progress,” despite its rough design, it’s kind of delightful. I mean I am so lucky to have had the experience of “Accidental Convertible” added to my life, and yes, I just shared it with a Facebook friend that I thought might like it.

Slide has been super productive since Google acquired it for $182 million back in August, coming out with a series of iOS apps including Photovine, Pool Party and group messaging app Disco in recent months. Prizes.org, a Slide-backed platform which allows you to create contests for money, like Video Inbox, heavily implements Facebook Connect.

However it’s still unclear how Slide’s churn of products is contributing to Google’s overall ambitions and strategy. Also: Why aren’t they formally pitching the tech press with this stuff? Honestly, some of it is actually pretty cool. And it’s getting to the point where it hard to keep track of them all.

Found at Prizes.org (which DotWeekly reported that Google secured back in April for Slide), Prizes is still in beta testing. But it is available for the public to use right now — though contest creation is still invite-only. You simply sign up with Facebook or Twitter (no Google options) and you’re ready to go.

Once you sign up, you’ll be presented with a stream of activities you can do — such as creating a soul mixtape — for money. You can follow any of these contests, or drill down into them for more information. And you can submit entries (solutions) for each contest.

Each contest has a time limit for completion. And they can get votes from other users. Users of Prizes can also get messages from other users, and get notifications for the contests they’re following.

The money aspect is currently only open to users with a “credit history”, meaning users have participated in contests in the past or created their own. The transactions are handled through PayPal (again, not a Google service — Checkout).

The idea is fairly compelling, though as usual, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any mention of Slide or Google anywhere on the site. You have to drill into the TOS to find that Slide, by way of Google, is behind the service. Given the lack of Google integration, it seems that this is yet another example of Google giving the Slide team free reign to do as they wish within the company. I mean, they’re really pushing the Facebook Connect integration. Interesting.

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 show new photos in real time.

The app is currently in invite-only beta testing. And Google was able to secure the poolpartyapp.com domain for it — not quite as sexy as disco.com, but it will do.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this is that Slide is building these new apps within Google while other teams at Google work on similar projects. For example, Google+ features both a group messaging component (Huddle) and a mobile photo sharing component (Instant Upload). When I asked the Google+ leads, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, why they weren’t just using Disco inside of Google+, they both said they had no idea what I was talking about — while smiling.

It’s believed that Slide is allowed to work autonomously on their own projects within Google, and both of these apps appear to be very much proof of that. The question is if and when Google will use its own clout to promote these things. Disco is already on version 2 with no Google promotion yet.

Sadly, unlike Facebook’s secret photos app, we were only able to secure two photos of Pool Party. Enjoy.

Update: A Brodie Duncan notes on Twitter, look what’s in the Android Market already — with 0 installs! It’s not clear if you’ll be able to use Pool Party this way since it’s in private beta, but get downloading!

Update 2: And look at that, it’s in the App Store as well! We previously believed it would be Android-only, but clearly that’s not the case.

So we’ll do Google’s job for them and tell you that version 2.0 of Disco is a nice upgrade. When we did a first look at the app, we noted that while it looked nice, it was fairly limited because it relied solely on SMS. Version 2.0 adds the ability to move away from SMS as use Push notifications to receive messages.

The move is an important one for Disco to better match its competition. GroupMe (which, coincidentally was born at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon a year ago) added Push capabilities to their app in March. Beluga (which Facebook acquired in March) has been more based around Push notifications from the beginning. The ability to use Push Notifications over data plans saves customers money versus SMS.

Also new in 2.0 is the ability to chat within the app (as opposed to only over SMS). This is another big feature as it makes the app more instantaneous and chat-like (again, more like the competition). And there’s finally the ability to manage groups within the app. Previously, you had to do this on the website.

So, now that Disco is up to speed with regard to competitors, will Google finally start promoting it? We’ll see. Perhaps this is all a part of their we-will-downplay-our-social-strategy-at-all-costs movement. That’s too bad, Disco is definitely worth a look.

You can find Disco for iPhone here and for Android here.

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, it’s a group messaging app that Google owns. So how is it?

Well, it’s very barebones right now. We’ve been playing around the app every since we stumbled upon it, and it’s pretty safe to say at this point that it’s not yet a GroupMe/Fast Society/Kik/Beluga/textPlus-killer. But it is also still in beta, and the iPhone app design implies that it will expand beyond its current shell which is little more than a way to organize group text messages.

In fact, better than the app is the Disco website, which provides a simple, streamlined way to send text messages to your groups from the web. And new messages appear in real time. You can also manage your groups from here, create new groups, and edit your profile. The site also works beautifully with the Google Voice Chrome extension if you have it installed.

As I said, the iPhone app is more of an initialization/organizational one. In fact, when you message someone, it simply loads up an iPhone-style SMS window which doesn’t show you previous messages sent in the group. This means your phone’s built-in SMS app is better to use for context.

Maybe that’s the idea — it’s definitely simple, which is nice. And the app looks good (which is not something you can say for all Google products). But I suspect updates to the app may allow you to see threads and perhaps even use Push Notifications instead of straight-up SMS (similar to the way GroupMe recently switched things up a bit).

Also funny: where’s the Android version? This is Google after all. But that should show you just how autonomous Slide is — they built an iPhone app within Google and completely neglected Android (I wouldn’t be surprised if one is coming though). It also speaks well to the notion that Google is looking for mobile developers to build hot apps from within the company.

Regardless of how it came about, Google now owns a player in the red-hot group messaging space — and it was actually built within the company! This means they don’t have to rush out to try and acquire someone to match Facebook’s acquisition of Beluga.

The next question is how this will tie-in with Google Voice, if at all.

You can find Disco in the App Store here.

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.

We’ve been testing the app here at TC HQ and thus far its pretty fast, perhaps because it’s initial build is more bare-bones than fellow group messaging contenders like Fast Society, Beluga and GroupMe. It’s actually pretty similar to the initial build of GroupMe before it added push notifications.

Again, the app is made by Slide, the storied social apps property which Google acquired in August for $182 million. Slide has made iPhone apps before, but the last one was Super Poke, an app created pre-Google acquisition. But Slide is being run as an autonomous business unit within Google, so this app is unrelated to any Google “Plus One” social projects, we hear.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the app and will update when we hear back.

How the app will fare competing in the already saturated group messaging space remains to be seen, and you read MG’s take on it here.

In the meantime here’s two fun facts: that’s Slide founder Max Levchin’s Facebook photo in the app screenshot (he’s the one on the bike) and the sample group on the Disco homepage is named GaGa Fan Club, interesting light of Lady Gaga’s recent Google visit.

h/t TheDomains

It can be easy to forget that despite the early success stories (or irrational hype, depending on how you perceive it), there are many more startups out there that aren’t taking off for one reason or another. And one of the earlier players in this latest wave, Treehouse, is sadly no more. The service has entered the Deadpool.

We first covered Treehouse in June of last year as perhaps the perfect app for capturing “bros icing bros”. And while it lasted longer than that trend, Treehouse is now shut down, co-founder Chrys Bader has confirmed to us.

But it’s not all sad news. One of the reasons Bader decided to shutter the service now is because he got recruited by Google to help them build out whatever it is they’re building in the social space. Bader declined to give details, but says he’s leading an “exciting new project” alongside the Slide team that Google acquired last August.

“I’m really excited about working with some proven entrepreneurs and to see what we’ll be able to accomplish as a small team within Google,” he says.

Treehouse was technically a part of Fliggo, a Y Combinator-backed startup that had originally set out to be one of the “Twitter for video” plays. They had also been known as Vidly. But Bader correctly predicted that mobile photo sharing was poised to take off, and thus we got Treehouse. The service was well executed, and had an interesting sharing model that was sort of a hybrid of Path and Instagram. But again, for whatever reason, it just didn’t catch on in the same way.

Perhaps Bader will be able translate some of what he learned in the space to whatever Google releases.

Update: In an email, Bader had a bit more to share, looking back on Treehouse and the overall space:

We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing.  It all started when we asked the question “What if you could see your friends’ camera rolls?” So many people take pictures on their iPhones that never see the light of day, so by being able to see your friends’ camera rolls, then you can see what your friends are up to.

At first, we decided to focus on privacy and creating a comfortable environment for people to share photos without worrying who sees them. Initially we had great traction in small groups, but quickly reached the realization that private sharing is difficult in groups of friends that do not all have iPhones.  This is a problem that Path is facing right now. Hyper-privacy does not work and moves against the natural motion of social products now, which is to be more open.

I’m happy to see Instagram’s success because it will bring forward the possibility of mobile photo sharing in people’s minds which will pave the way for new apps to have a chance to blow the lid off of the space.  We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of the mobile photo space, and I’m excited to see Instagram lock-down a long-term vision and watch Path slowly become more open.

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 them on TV. And now we have Hitpost.

Or we will soon. Hitpost is set to launch later this month as an app for both iPhones and Android phones. With it, you can easily take pictures of the sports game you’re watching and share them with friends. “Simply put, we create a live social community of sports fans who edit the content instead of ESPN,” says Krane.

Krane brings with him some experience to the table as Hitpost is really a combination of two things he’s learned. First, he’s bringing what he’s learned from the social perspective from his time at Slide, where he worked on the Top Friends application, which was at the time the most popular app on Facebook. And he’s bringing what he’s learned over the past year working on Snapshot, a HTML5-based web application for viewing sports images built alongside Sports Illustrated.

Snapshot was the first product that Hitpost got out the door when it launched a month ago alongside the Chrome Web Store roll out. And they’re going to continue to work on it and support it, but Krane felt the timing was right for them to expand into the mobile space and bring what they’ve learned.

“This is our pretty unfettered vision,” Krane notes. He says that sports addicts often pull out their phones every 30 minutes or so when they’re on the go to check up on scores and try to catch highlights of the games they care about. With Hitpost, that content will be delivered right to them in a visual way. This content can be delivered either by what team you’re interested in, what your friends are showing, or based on your location.

And users will be able to add their own commentary to the pictures along the top. This can actually make the images pretty funny. Below the pictures, conversations are had about the games.

But again, why TV images? Why not images from people actually at those games? “This is for what people actually do. People take photos of their TVs. Users are asking for an easier way to do it,” Krane says noting that pictures taken from high up in the stands from camera phones are no good anyway at capturing in-game action.

And Hitpost has some money to make all of this happen. While they’re already making some revenue from Snapshot, the team also raised an angel round of funding last year from a number of high-profile angels including Keith Rabois, Shervin Pishevar, and Naval Ravikant. Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures also contributed to the round which came in a little over $500,000, Krane says.

Hitpost currently has 8 employees (and 1 volunteer) and they’re based out of an office in the SoMa area of San Francisco. Look for their app to hit later this month.

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 endless meetings– almost always creeps in. It’s a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation.

Google has a new policy to fight it, according to several sources close to the company. A memo was reportedly sent out a few weeks ago to certain Google business and country heads talking about a new policy of “autonomous units” within the company. It’s being referred to in parts of the company as the “NYT effect,” a reference to this New York Times article that criticized how bloated and bureaucratic Google had become, citing it as a big reason Google was losing employees to smaller companies.

Not everyone gets to be an autonomous unit, but those who do have the freedom to run like independent startups with almost no approvals needed from HQ, according to our sources. For these divisions, Google is essentially a holding company that provides back end services like legal, providing office space and organizing travel, but everything else is up to the pseudo-startup. We’re told the memo cites Slide as the first working example.

It’s unclear how different this may be from Google’s acquisition of YouTube, which also had the promise of autonomy. But even when Google was still private, sticking to such promises was a challenge. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has openly talked about his frustration when a pre-IPO Google bought Blogger, saying that a big hope was having more resources to hire people, but the process of hiring people was so fraught with logistics and red-tape that hiring was a nightmare.

TechCrunch has not been able to find a copy of this “NYT effect” memo, although while digging, we were told that Google is getting so aggressive on leaks that an average of two people are being fired every month for the offense. (Sorry, guys, but at least Facebook is hiring nearly everyone in Silicon Valley.) We have talked with a few people with or close to Google in other countries that have seen the memo or heard of it, another person who was able to negotiate a deal all of the sudden with an international Google unit that was blocked by corporate months before, and people very close to Slide who say that the company has been running remarkably independently and only a handful of people have left since the deal closed.

One source told us autonomy was not part of Slide’s negotiation, rather it was a decision made a few months ago. As a result, Slide has become more independent since the acquisition, not less, according to this person. Slide even had its own Christmas party last night, and there was nary a Google sign from what we heard. (For comparison sake, TechCrunch is run very distinctly from the rest of AOL, but even we are rocking with the whole Silicon Valley AOL crew later tonight. That should be interesting…)

Even if the policy change is exaggerated by our sources, no one has disputed how distinctly Slide is being run, and that is surprising. Most people– including us– had assumed that the biggest reason Google bought Slide was to acquire talent like CEO and founder Max Levchin and to make the product a key part of its Frankenstein-like social initiatives. It’s not like Slide was YouTube, a distinct consumer brand that was a part of the zeitgeist with hundreds of millions of regular users. Slide has spent most of its life as a work in progress– from photo sharing to push media to SuperPoke and other Facebook apps to games and virtual goods.

According to someone very close to the company, Slide is still evolving and working on something new. Rather than being part of Google’s overall social strategy, whatever Slide is building now is likely a hedge on that greater social strategy not working. This person doesn’t know for sure what the new Google-Slide product will be, although this person’s guess is it goes back Slide’s early days of sharing photos in creative, self-expressive ways. Slide has long seen that the key to social is photo tagging and sharing, and was reevaluating a new way to use that hook on mobile well before the recent explosion of iPhone photo apps like Instagram, Picplz and Path. (I spoke with Levchin briefly this morning, but he declined to comment on anything.)

If you have the memo, we’d love to see it.

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 wasn’t. It’s precisely the mistake that Jeff Bezos and Amazon didn’t make when eBay was the ecommerce, monkeys-could-run-this-train darling.

Yahoo was never going to win at search, just like Amazon never would have won at auctions. It wasn’t in the company’s DNA. Even after millions spent to build better search and search monetization systems (PANAMA!) there were obvious gaffes. Vinny Lingham, who used to have a business running massive offshore keyword campaigns for US companies, hated buying them on Yahoo because he had to separately purchase keywords for each international territory, but with Google, the purchase experience was all unified on one screen.

That’s because Yahoo was a company built on department-store like fiefdoms, with each country and division enjoying its own silo, vying for a slice of the front page with one another. When Yahoo was in the throws of its Microsoft take-over drama, I asked the head of one of Yahoo’s largest and most successful verticals what he thought about it. He answered, “It doesn’t really affect me, my division is basically a small business, and we can be the same small business inside of Microsoft.”

You could see this approach mirrored in Yahoo’s always cluttered front page vs. Google’s stubbornly Spartan one. Google as an organization was almost allergic to the idea of giving people anything else to do to keep them on its site, while Yahoo’s former-CEO Tim Koogle once bragged that search queries were going down, keeping people from leaving Yahoo. There was a basic DNA to the two companies that was at odds: One all about enabling discovery of the Web and one all about enabling discovery of….Yahoo.

It became fashionable to say Yahoo needed to be more of a technology company not a media company. But Yahoo was good at being a media company—it amassed an audience of half-a-billion people coming to its front page. When we launched TechTicker on Yahoo Finance it quickly got four-times the reach of CNBC. I’d love to take the credit, but that was the platform. Yahoo’s mistake was trying to become a Hollywood-style media company. Purple exclamation marks just aren’t Hollywood-cool no matter how many times Tom Cruise visits the campus.

Which brings us (belatedly) to the point of this post: Google needs to stop trying to be Facebook and focus on extending and investing in what makes Google successful: The Algorithm. Social media is about people, not algorithms. In a weird, way we’ve gone from content being in vogue (early AOL, Yahoo) to algorithms being in vogue (Google and those weird Ask.com ads) and now back to content—albeit the user generated kind. It’s just not Google’s strong point anymore than search was Yahoo’s. You can bet somewhere inside Google a manager is yelling that Facebook surpassed it today in time spent on site. But as the contrast with Yahoo shows, Google was never playing that game. That’s like me being jealous of Stephanie Meyer because she sold more books on vampires.

Google has spent billions acquiring social media companies between Slide, YouTube, investing in Zynga and other smaller deals. And yet, I don’t hear a damn bit of buzz about this new gaming platform. What are people excited about? Instant search and priority inbox.

Sure, as a public company Google needs to grow, but the best opportunity isn’t all this social nonsense, it’s Android. It’s clearly where Eric Schmidt’s heart is. And it’s where Google is using endemic advantages — a suite of cloud-based apps people love and a hoard of cash and market influence– to do something no one else could: Pose a threat to the iPhone. With social Google is working against its own endemic advantages. And with the billions of people bridging the digital divide via mobile, a low-cost, open smart phone strategy comes at the exact right moment, versus Google’s social strategy which comes way too late.

Google hasn’t gone the Yahoo way yet, but it’s on the precipice: Don’t let Facebook define what you’re not, continue to excel at what you do well.

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 Google Checkout. This seems modest compared to PayPal, which is growing by over 40 percent year over year, with total payment volume equaling $13.1 billion in Q2. While Google doesn’t reveal its transaction figures, it’s safe to assume that Checkout isn’t seeing nearly as much money flowing through its payment system as PayPal or even Amazon. But the landscape could look much differently if Google successfully makes three big plays.

First, Google starts pushing Checkout with the launch of Google Games later this year. As we reported earlier in July, Google invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming giant Zynga, with part of the strategic deal including Zynga’s games in Google’s Games portal. And Google just bought Slide in an effort to boost its standing in the social games world. These moves give Checkout a platform to grow. According to an Inside Network report, the U.S. market for virtual goods will reach $1.6 billion in 2010 alone. Social gaming contributes $835 million of that number.

Zynga is making a killing on virtual goods and currently PayPal is reaping the benefits of this by powering payments for the social gaming giant. Zynga has been reported to be PayPal’s second largest merchant, behind eBay. PayPal has processed about $500 million in virtual goods payments in 2009 alone (though it’s unclear how many of the transactions related to Zynga games).

Clearly there is a lot of money to be made here. PayPal had a net income of $817 million in Q2. And with access to a more proven Google Checkout, Zynga could always consider negotiating a lower fee than they currently receive with PayPal (see fees) or make a deal for advertising, as it reportedly did with Facebook Credits.

Gaming is the obvious opportunity for Checkout, but the second is Places which Google has scaled to over 4 million businesses . Places lets local businesses claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, “happy hour tonight”), create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons.

What’s missing here? A transaction. Why not blend Checkout with Places, and allow users to buy directly from the merchant? This seems like a logical and potentially lucrative next step. Yelp is reportedly starting to do this. Imagine if merchants could channel relevant search results to a one-click transaction, of course brokered by Google Checkout.

Finally, the writing is on the wall for Google to attempt to integrate Checkout with media consumption. Google is reportedly building a paid content system for publishers, which would allow online news publishers to take payments for subscriptions and content via Checkout. And it would naturally follow that Checkout is the payments platform of choice for Google’s upcoming cloud-based Music service. We already know that any of this content that is consumed over an Android will most likely have Checkout as the default option.

Each of these three plays relies on execution, and Google has a mixed record with new product development (i.e.Google Wave). But there has never been a more lucrative opportunity for Google’s payments system to become a more viable threat to PayPal or other more popular payments systems. If Google can make Checkout ubiquitous, and loosen PayPal’s kung-fu grip on the payment space, then every opportunity mentioned above will only be the beginning.

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). Slide raised a total of $78 million and at one point had a $500 million valuation.

We also conveniently broke down what everybody made from the deal. Founder Max Levchin got $39 million (after investing $7 million of his own money), BlueRun Ventures pocketed $28 million, early investor Scott Bannister made $5 million, while later investors basically got their money back. (Thank you, Sarah Lacy).

Slide could never really figure out what it wanted to be. It constantly shifted its strategy, from a desktop photo app to widgets to Facebook apps to social games. Slide started strong out of the gates, quickly becoming one of the largest Facebook app developers with apps like Top Friends and SuperPoke. As it became obvious that it would be difficult to make money from standalone Facebook other than games, Slide tried to hunker down and regroup.

But it does have a deep, battle-scarred team that knows social. And Google is desperate to get social right. In the blog post announcing the deal, engineering director David Glazer spins:

For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and 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.

The truth is that Google is more about data than people. It could use some engineers who understand social interactions better, and Slide has a lot of them. Their mission will be to “make Google services socially aware,” and likely will be part of Google’s not-so-secret social network in the making, dubbed Google Me.

Google is gearing up for war with Facebook. But when it comes to social, they are the ones who might get slaughtered.

• Slide out keyboard
• World Phone
• 5 megapixel camera
• Unique interface
• $179 with contract

Pros:

• Doubletwist for OS agnostic media syncing
• Lots of social media connectivity
• Interesting UI and Android 2.1

Cons:

• A little big
• Keyboard a bit cramped
• A bit slow

T-Mobile has been on an Android roll lately. With a number of great devices – including the Granddaddy, the G1, and the older uncle, the MyTouch, the company essentially owns the Android space, at least in terms of handset availability. Obviously other folks – ahem Evo cough Droid – own the mindshare, but T-Mo is plugging away like a champ.

The introduction of the MyTouch Slide gives Blackberry and, more importantly, Sidekick lovers something to lust after. The device, which looks like the standard MyTouch 3G, slides down to reveal a small but usable keyboard.

The Good
T-Mobile worked closely with HTC to create a unique but basic Android experience. For example, the MyModes feature allows you to update the look and feel based on your mood and activities. Like a mullet, you can set things up so it’s business up front and party in the back. There is also a Faves feature to replace MyFaves. This new system is basically a carousel of your favorite friends and brings in social media – Twitter and Facebook, mostly – updates as well as contact information.

Otherwise, you’re looking at a stock Android 2.1 install without all of the HTC Sense UI nonsense.

Call quality was strong and I had good reception in Las Vegas and Brooklyn. Your results may vary. Battery life is strong. It lasts about 18 hours with minimal usage and about 7 hours of heavy browsing and calls. It also has a unique and useful voice control function very similar to the iOS voice command system. The phone also has a full-sized headphone jack, which is a mitzvah.

The Bad
The phone is clad in black plastic and feels a bit chintzy. The keyboard, however, has none of the play of previous, similarly shaped phones like the Palm Pre and it pops out with an authoritative click.

In terms of usability, the phone bogs down a bit when usage gets too heavy. The unique contacts carousel is cool, but when there are other things processing in the background the animations start to slow down.

Bottom Line
Other than a few tiny details, I’m quite pleased with the MyTouch. It’s an entry-level phone for messaging addicts and that’s just fine. At about $180 with contract, you really can’t go wrong and HTC worked closely with T-Mobile to offer a unique but pure Android experience.

Who is this for? It’s for folks who miss their Sidekick and want a keyboard for messaging. The MyTouch 3G Slide’s processor won’t win the blue ribbon at the County Fair, but it is an impressive bit of cellphone.

Product Page

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 already more Chinese than Americans online and China is only at about 20% Internet penetration. And yet, so far, Yahoo is the only one to play this market well, by swapping its local assets and $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba back in 2005.

But a funny thing has happened between my last trip to China in October of last year and my current trip. The Silicon Valley Web 2.0 gang has invaded. OK, “invaded” is the wrong word, it’s more like gingerly “waded into the pool.” Most of the entrants are being very cautious, staying below the radar with limited, hedged plans. But there is a clear trend of Web 2.0 testing the Chinese waters—and hoping it doesn’t make the mistake the first generation made.

The picture above– snapped at a Beijing newsstand where Scarlett Johansson and Sarah Jessica Parker were the only other faces I recognized– is a good metaphor for the kind of hey!-don’t-look-at-us!, easing-into-the-market approach the Web 2.0 generation is taking. (Note the word “metaphor.” I’m not implying Facebook planted this or even pitched the story to what I understand is an English language learning magazine.)

There is Playfish’s office, the Zynga acquisition of XPD Media and Hulu CEO Jason Killar’s recent visit to Beijing where he announced an impending China launch. Just last weekend Max Levchin of Slide hosted a developer day at the company’s Shanghai office. Who even knew Slide had a Shanghai office? (It’s interesting that Levchin grew up in Soviet Russia just like Google founder Sergey Brin but apparently doesn’t have the same hang up with the Chinese government.) Facebook is reportedly opening an office next and I spoke with several people over the last week who said they had gotten calls from headhunters.

Will Silicon Valley Web 2.0 companies do better than the 1.0 generation? It depends on what the community has learned from such abject failure. A few lessons seem obvious, judging by the new, more cautious approach.

Lesson #1: The Valley learned it can’t be cocky. No one is making bold statements about taking over the Chinese market the way Web 1.0 leaders did. I remember a keynote by Meg Whitman in the early 2000s where she boasted that the “Sun never sets on eBay,” so assured of its future in China. Yeah, that didn’t go so well. No one is swaggering into China with the same bravado today. China has developed more $1 billion-plus Internet companies than any other market and most of them started out as US copycats on features, where they excelled was in process, execution and business models. Today, Web entrepreneurs get that.

Lesson #2: It’s China’s house, you have to play by China’s rules. A lot of people hate this one, but it’s just reality. You know that scene in “Jerry Maguire” where Tom Cruise storms out of the office and says “WHO IS COMING WITH ME?” and pretty much only Renee Zellweger joins him? That’s pretty much what Google’s pull out of the China market in March was. Since that date, Web 2.0 companies have only upped their China hires.

Lesson #3: Hire first, launch later. Most of these offices are just development offices, taking advantage of local talent. But make no mistake: This is a savvy way to assess the market and build connections. Talent isn’t that cheap in Beijing and Shanghai relative to the rest of the emerging world and the price is escalating. Call it the Hulu model– the company had an R&D division in Bejing long before it announced its recent intention to actually launch service in China.

All-in-all these three lessons make for a smart strategy. China is the only country outside the United States that’s given birth to several billion-dollar-plus Internet companies and there’s some $20 billion in venture capital sloshing around this country, by some estimates, that’s anxious to find the next local crop. There’s no question there’s a lot of momentum investing here and a lot of these startups will fail. But whenever you have this much activity and 400 million people online, there will be more big hits too. This is simply not our market for the taking.

But where the Web 1.0 generation was too cocky, the question is whether the Web 2.0 generation is being too cautious. Online games and virtual goods are already big markets in China—bigger than in the US in fact. And there are already big local iterations of things like Facebook and Twitter. Is it already too late for some of these companies?

Clearly, the Valley is still trying to figure out how it plays in China. At least this generation is trying to learn, listen and make friends first and colonize later.

The Panelists:
John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
Moderated by Eric Eldon

Pleasants’ prediction came after an audience member asked if the social gaming companies would be able to sustain the growth they saw through much of last year. Zynga COO Vish Makhijani acknowledged that Zynga had seen some slowdown last quarter, but said that signs pointed to that trend changing. And the general consensus seemed to be that there was still lots of room for growth on Facebook, particularly internationally. The group also noted that there were opportunities abroad on social networks other than Facebook.

Another question touched on multiplayer in social games — or, rather, the lack thereof. Look at most popular social games these days, and you’ll notice that most of the interaction between games happens asynchronously, which isn’t really ‘multiplayer’ in the traditional sense. Lolapps CEO Kavin Stewart says this is because there already is a market for synchronous gaming, with games like World of Warcraft and console games. Slide VP Keith Rabois echoed this sentiment, explaining that synchronous multiplayer games are generally time consuming, and that Slide’s research showed that most people use Facebook in quick, 5-10 minute sessions between classes or when their boss isn’t looking. Not everyone agreed that synchronous gaming was out of the picture though — Playdom’s John Pleasants said that we’d probably see synchronous gameplay as an extension of some asynchronous games (I think he’s right).

One audience member asked about the recent report that Zynga was worth $5 billion. Makhijani declined to comment on the report, but CrowdStar’s Peter Relan concluded that it wasn’t off base. His logic? Relan says that casual games can scale to 10x the audience of more ‘hardcore’ games like World of Warcraft, and perhaps even more than that. The revenue models are different for these games (WoW uses recurring subscriptions while social games favor virtual currencies and virtual goods) but he says this huge audience make the valuation reasonable.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the panel was what wasn’t said, at least not directly. During a question on monetization — namely, Facebook’s Credits — there was a lot of talk about how a unified credits system can help developers because it allows for one-click purchases across all games. But there was also a sense that the developers didn’t want Facebook’s currency to become the only option for developers. Slide’s Keith Rabois noted that Facebook Credits are good for paying users, but there are other channels (like Offers) that address a broader audience. In other words, he doesn’t want to be chained to Facebook Credits, at least not yet.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t always matter what the developers want. When asked if Facebook listened to these game developers when it came to policy changes, most of the execs noted that while Facebook might solicit their input, when push comes to shove it does what it wants.

This is a somewhat surprising move, because Slide only launched the two Facebook applications last fall. The magic-themed SuperPocus launched in October, and Top Fish, a virtual aquarium app, launched in early November. Both games were designed to turn into virtual economies that revolved around virtual gifts. Clearly Slide has a ‘sink-or-swim’ attitude with regard to its applications, and it’s ready to cut its losses quickly.  Slide VP of Strategy and Business Development Keith Rabois says that the company is continuously evaluating its games based on their growth, user retention, and monetization, and that the two games weren’t reaching their goals.  Rabois says that the company intends to release a new project later this month.

Slide has dabbled in quite a few areas related to social gaming and online communities over the years. It is behind some of Facebook’s most popular games, as well as other entertaining apps like SuperPoke. The company used to generate most of its revenue through advertising, but the majority of its income now comes from virtual goods.

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 event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.

Winners of the raffle do not get to become Best Friends Forever with the founders. But they will get one intense mentoring session each.