Et tu, Slide?

Last April, when Google bought Slide, I implied that it was a stupid acquisition (I’m a nice guy, so I nicely said they over-paid).

The new bosses at Google must agree with me, because as of last night, Slide is no more. As reported to AllThingsD, Google has shut down Slide and its founder Max Levchin is leaving company, presumably to start his next company.

Included in the list of shut down projects is the semi-popular game SuperPoke Friends as well as a bunch of non-related social app projects.

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Last April, when Google bought Slide, I implied that it was a stupid acquisition (I’m a nice guy, so I nicely said they over-paid).

The new bosses at Google must agree with me, because as of last night, Slide is no more. As reported to AllThingsD, Google has shut down Slide and its founder Max Levchin is leaving company, presumably to start his next company.

Included in the list of shut down projects is the semi-popular game SuperPoke Friends as well as a bunch of non-related social app projects (group photo app Photovine, Pool Party, Disco, and Video Inbox. The only Slide-related project left standing is Prizes.org, where users can offer a prize for other users doing something for them (which is a cool site, by the way).

When Google bought Slide, their social gaming strategy literally was, let’s buy this company and let them build whatever you want. The result was a bunch of relatively cool yet unpopular apps (given Google’s size) with no connection to each other whatsoever.

But now, Google is taking it’s social network Google+ and social gaming very seriously. All social gaming efforts are focused on Google+ and if a project or team does not fit within the Google+ strategy, it’s out of here. This is a good thing for gamers, in that there is actual real competition happening between Facebook and Google in social games.

It does suck, however, for the gamers who have been playing SuperPoke Friends for the past few years. As reported by AOL Games Blog, SuperPoke Friends will be closing on Facebook. There are only 450,000 monthly average users left playing this game, but if you have invested money cute little virtual sheep, it is a bummer.