

6 Companies Google Should Buy Right Now - nategraves
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/6-companies-google-should-buy-right-now-570740

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TomOfTTB
Quick run down of my reactions...

Valve: This makes the least sense to me. You shouldn't enter a highly
competitive market (like games) as a side project.

Twitter: I don't think all that many people care about the real time web. But
even if they did the question becomes "Why couldn't Google create a search
engine that crawls Twitter every few minutes?" They don't need to own Twitter
to make a real time search product from Twitter's data (which is all public
after all)

StumbleUpon, Last.fm & FriendFeed: In all these cases the author assumes
there's some value in knowing what the users of these services find
interesting. But the truth about all of them is they have a very small niche
audience. Meaning if Google used them they'd be skewing their results to a
small audience while possibly alientating everyone else.

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wildwood
Also, even if StumbleUpon provides targeted advertising, it's still quite
likely to be very poor-performing traffic. If you're exposing people to things
they were unaware of before, then, by definition, they're going to be very
early in the sales process, and the conversion rate will be abysmal.

~~~
fallentimes
Because of StumbleUpon's very low costs ($.05 per unique visitor) for targeted
traffic, their ads, which aren't even marked as such, can be a really good
deal depending on what your site or product is.

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mikeyur
I'm going to make a new bullshit list and make sure my company is on it.
Anyone else want to be on it?

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trickjarrett
BS. I think Google is going to slow down on the acquisitions. Based on the
ratio of projects they buy that die, I think they're going to begin pushing
for more internal development and less acquiring outside technologies.

Of course if a site is a sensation and has an established community in a short
time that may be worth purchasing but overall I don't think we'll see Google
going after any of these.

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callmeed
Don't agree with any except twitter and possibly FriendFeed

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gne1963
They missed one: 7\. YHacker News

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gne1963
Why is everyone so negative on me suggesting Number 7: YHacker News

I was a joke folks! ;-)

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sam_in_nyc
I want this prediction on the record, somewhere: Google will buy my company
before any of these.

