August 31, 2010 – Most of Google’s latest attainments have been related to social networking and games, fueling conjecture that the company plans to make public a new social-networking service, potentially centered on games, to compete with Facebook.
SocialDeck developed many games incorporating Shake & Spell, a word game alike to Boggle. A person can also open the game on Facebook and play alongside friends who are using iPhone and BlackBerry apps.
The game has social networking features as well, incorporating a page that displays other friends at present playing the game, a leader board and statistics of friends’ gaming performance. Players can also post comments in a flow alike to instant messaging.
SocialDeck, which has workers in both places such as Toronto and San Francisco, did get financing from the BlackBerry Partners Fund in early 2009. The SocialDeck team will work in partnership with Google staff in Waterloo, Ontario.
Google had acquired SocialDeck. At Google, SocialDeck workers will join Angstro, a company that built a product called Noteworthy News that delivers news about people and companies in a user’s professional network.
Its other attainments this month comprise of Slide, a social games developer; Jambool, a company that makes a platform for managing online payment for virtual goods sold on gaming and social networking web sites; and Like.com, a visual shopping engine.
