Google buys Pyra Labs

Argyle writes "SiliconValley.com reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event."

Comments

just me or ..

[josh crawley]

Is it just me or does it seem that Google is trying to become the number 1 information portal?

Re:I think

[jesdynf]

If you don't have any idea what they're going to be doing with it, what business do you have reproaching it?

Based on their past performance...

Google image search? Hoo yeah.

Maps, phonebooks, toolbar, search-term
spellchecker? Good ideas all, if not earthshattering, but it shows a consistent effort to improve the utility and relevance of their product.

Google News? Big pluses here.

Google Answers? Heh. Okay. But like I said, it deserved to be explored.

Google AdWords? They found -advertising- that -doesn't suck-. Yeesh. What does it take to impress you? ... based on that, they're up to something that bears close attention. I can't speak to the -profitability- of it, but they're still here, at least.

If your opinion differs, so be it, but I'm not sure you're basing it on -anything- other than reflexive avoidance of a perceived agenda.

Buying and selling the wisdom of the masses

[mateub]

Google seems to be establishing a pattern with this purchase.

They bought Deja News, or whatever it was called, giving them direct access to the wisdom of the masses, as encoded in newsgroups. Except that newsgroups seem to be a fading concept, supplanted by mailing lists and blogs. Well, Google can't very well buy mailing lists (from whom would you buy them?) but they just bought most of the blogs. Note that they haven't bought or apparently even tried to buy any traditional mass-media company (CNN, NY Times, Knight-Ridder, etc). In the business world, nobody has placed much value so far on the collected, shared knowledge of the masses, so Google can buy Deja and Pyra for cheap.

The big question is what owning the major information conduits of the masses gets Google. Google didn't just buy Atrios or Dave Barry, they bought the medium everyone is using to blog.

This kind of gets me back to an idea I blogged about a little while back--that you could probably make a business out of aggregating blogs into an ersatz net magazine and selling advertising space on the result. Google presents the advertisers with the combined traffic of the top 20 blogs, shows them a prototype of a salon-style magazine and asks how much they'd pay for ad space, then goes to those top 20 blogs and asks them whether they'd agree to publish regularly in exchange for some (smallish) cut of the ad revenue.

Makes me wonder how long we have until Google buys LiveJournal...

adeu,
Mateu