In is run of buying and acquisition, Facebook purchased most of drop.io, an online content-sharing service.
Drop.io is an online service where users create a “drop” (file-sharing page), and share various files like documents, videos and other digital contents through it. Users can also set a time period on the existence of a particular drop, and permissions for who can view or alter the content, and share it in a variety of ways.
With the acquisition, the company will be shutting down the service. Users are no longer allowed to create new drops, and current users (both free and premium) are being asked to download all their files before December 15th after which they will be deleted.
Along with the acquisition of most of the company, Facebook have also taken in the chief executive Sam Lessin.
According to Venturebeat, the acquisition is more inclined towards acquiring new talent rather than new a technology.
Google has bought yet another start-up called Angstro.
Angstro was launched in 2008 that delivers news to users based on their social graph, by scanning through blog contents, news sites, and social sites.
Rohit Khare, founder of Angstro, bid farewell in a post on the company’s blog:
Salim and I would like to thank everyone who was part of the adventure — not least, the thousands of users and beta testers who helped define our products and inspired our whole team.
While our work here may be done, the struggle for open, interoperable social networks is still only just beginning, and I’m looking forward to working on that in my new role at Google.
This is the fourth acquisition Google has made in this month – social gaming company Slide, virtual currency maker Jambool, visual shopping engine Like.com, and now Angstro.
Apart from acquiring the start-ups and their technologies, Google has also been adding more talents in its pool.
Though Google’s has not confirmed, yet its actions only adds fuel to the speculations about Google building a Facebook-killer service dubbed as ‘GoogleMe.’
Facebook’s latest acquisition is a company called Octazen Solutions, which i believe is one most people have not heard about.
Ocatazen Solutions, a small Malaysian startup, are maker of a contact importer that the social network had already been using to grow its number of users by encouraging them to invite their email contacts.
The word around the web is that Octazen is an incredibly successful data-scraping operation, grabbing users’ social graphs from one service and porting them to another.
Spokesperson for Facebook says: “We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and this is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent,” and refers to the purchase as a “small talent acquisition.”
The real intention of Facebook on the acquisition is not clear as users can already find new Facebook buddies via major services like AIM and Gmail.
With more than 400 million users now Facebook has kept fairly quiet on the acquisition front, focusing primarily on talent buys rather than products. In the last one year Facebook has bought Parakey and Friendfeed.
Could the acquisition be an answer to Google Buzz, or just to a push to consolidate it’s presence on the web. We’ll have to wait and watch.
