Slashdot Mirror
'Superpoke' To Be No More, Thanks To Google
angry tapir writes "Apparently the age of 'superpoking' social network friends and throwing sheep at them is coming to a close. Google plans to shut down the social applications developed by Slide, a company it acquired a year ago for US$182 million. Slide products include SuperPoke, and photo management and decorating tools like Slideshow and FunPix. Slide's applications like Slideshow were very popular on MySpace during its heyday, and found success on other social networking sites, including Facebook, where the sheep-throwing feature of SuperPoke caught on, entertaining and annoying many."
Donno if I should compare Superpoke to a VW Superbeetle with upgraded front suspension and a redesigned front clip, or if I should think of it as an orgy relative to the Poke's sexual overtone...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
SuperPoke is a Facebook application. Why have an application that is tied in with a competitor's product? G+ is obviously a lot more important to Google than SuperPoke is, so SuperPoke is going to die.
Does this mean Google+ won't be filled with extremely annoying "applications"?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Seems silly to purchase a company, then just shut everything they own down.
Yup, SuperPoke is on its way out. And the Pokers are piiiiiiiiiiissed.
Read my blog.
Does this mean Google+ won't be filled with extremely annoying "applications"?
Given that in other news Google has confessed that G+ is really an identity clearinghouse and not a socializing gadget, that's exactly what it means.
First they're pitching G+ as an identity service, then they're killing the SuperPoke! Which is it? Are you evil are not, Google?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Seems silly to purchase a company, then just shut everything they own down.
Not necessarily. The company generates value for Facebook, a competitor of Google's new service, Google +. By shutting the company down, Google could, for example, be engaging in a strategic decision to increase their market power by decreasing the services available to a competitor. This would be not-quite-classic antitrust behavior. IIRC, Google has in the past done other things in defiance of market regulation--didn't one or two members of their board give interviews that were big no-no's under SEC rules prior to the IPO?
While it seems more likely that Slide is simply not generating enough money to be worth keeping around, that is by no means the only possibility.
Mod this up!
That's pretty much the same exact vibe I've gotten.
Yet here I am using G+...
She's your mother AND your sister.
Using the logic of the comments presented in tfa, we can sue every time an MMO shuts down if we paid for items in it?
That just seems crazy.
I can only imagine how much money FB made from this application. Those TechCrunch commenters were dumping money into FB ads. I imagine Uncle Sam is going to be all over this. "Don't be Evil"
There could be any number of reasons for this.
We don't know how many people used the Slide products. It could very well be that the Slide products were on a downward usage trend...
I mean really...the one thought that popped into my head when I saw the headline was
"And nothing of value was lost."
Go home dad, you're drunk
.....and good riddance. Who ever used the sheeptossing feature, anyway? What a joke.
Take me back to the good old IRC days please. It's been a while since I smacked someone around with a large trout.
I mean, G+'s and facebook's obsession with getting our personal data qualifies as a "superpeek"...
What does this mean, will an Apple update like iOS 5 kill the app and no update will come from Google? My 5-year-old cousin adores her pet Panda. From her perspective she's had it since she was 3.
The end is near, folks.
Is it just me or does it seem like the lack of revenue growth has caused an increase in the amount of bean counters and cost accounting in order to better ballance its share price?
http://saveie6.com/
I thought a "superpoke" would poke like two memory locations at a time or something.
Regardless of the actual decision, the comments quoted are very scary, a mix of rage an delusion.
But this I think is hilarious:
Iâ(TM)ve heard of suicide missions but this tops them all! If Google really does shut down SuperPoke Pets they might as well close their own doors at the same time.
Dilbert RSS feed
was given that day.
I once had an accounting professor point out that dividends simply transfer assets from the business to its shareholders, and that the share price might drop to compensate for the fact that the company now has less assets. Some may prefer to get a return in dividend form, but it's not magic.
Though in general, I think it's fair to teach what the theory says as well as what actually happens
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Lost in all the publicity is the simple fact that Slide (makers of SuperPoke) let the thing die long before Google did. SuperPoke had 35k monthly active users while SuperPoke Pets had 135k monthly active. In the world of social networking apps, this is a dead application... esp bad considering the amount of funding that went into the company both pre and post Google acquisition.
You need 270k monthly users just to break the top 1,000.
http://www.appdata.com/leaderboard/apps?fanbase=0&metric_select=mau&page=25
Did you even read the linked articles for that story? It was a complete anti-Google FUD piece. Eric Schmidt said that it was an "identity service", but never that it wasn't a social network or that the social aspect was "bait". That was all from the imagination of the poster.
Similarly, if you followed the link that was labeled "will seriously downgrade your other Google services", you would have found an article that claimed "In both scenarios, downgrading from Google+ will have no effect on other Google services like Gmail, Docs, etc."
I don't mean to be rude, but please try to not be a tool. There are a lot of junk articles on Slashdot lately, and we can do each other and Slashdot a lot of good by rejecting them instead of treating nonsense editorializing as fact.
There are valid reasons to criticize Google+, and I would like to see more about that stuff rather than made up stories (and later on, comments that suggest that the made up stories were somehow real).