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'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."
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."
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+...
1. Acquire company that helps out a competitor
2. Shut it down
3. ???
4. Evil!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You must be new to the corporate world.
When I was a kid, going out for a coke a smoke and a poke meant something completely different.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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?
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."
.....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"...
Oh and what's with tech companies spending boat loads of money and then dropping the products? Is this a new fad?
Microsoft - Kin
HP - WebOS/TouchPad
Google - Slide
Really, none of them could think a year ahead?
I think step 3 is "lose money."
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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/
"Oh and what's with tech companies spending boat loads of money and then dropping the products? Is this a new fad?
Microsoft - Kin
HP - WebOS/TouchPad
Google - Slide
Really, none of them could think a year ahead?
"
Stock prices have taken a brutal beating this month thanks to the debt ceiling debate and huge pressure is on for companies to cut their expenses to raise their stock price. In finance 101, the goal of a company is always to increase its share price to make daytraders happy. It is never to make money.
This has been the trend for the last 15 years actually. The goal is always to think short term and cut as much expenses as you can. Also by going on a buying spree you raise the stock price as well.
Now Google is hiting its revenue ceiling as Baudu won in China, and their are maximized in the US and Europe so in order to keep its insane $300/share price it needs to cut costs by selling its assets and cutting expenses. In the case of HP, the CEO is retarded as he thinks HP can magically become SAP (his former employer) by just buying companies and rebranding them as HP service ones. Google is doing what it can to help the CEO keep his job.
Apple is the only one with brains left, but if push comes to shove and they maximize their revenue with the IPAD/IPhone/Macs they too will sell their assets and drop markets and lay off employees too.
http://saveie6.com/
DVDMaestro (Spruce Technologies)
Final Touch Pro
probably a few others.
google are just taking a leaf out of the other software companies' books.
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
In finance 101, the goal of a company is always to increase its share price to make daytraders happy. It is never to make money.
Very, very, very incorrect. I know it must seem that way sometimes but if you do actually take Finance 101 sometime - and I actually did as part of my MBA - or work in a large public corporation, you will find that the truth is quite different.
First, nobody gives a shit about day traders. Second, a public company's responsibility is to its shareholders, the vast numerical majority of which are not daytraders or even shmoes like you and me, but large institutional investors. These companies buy millions of shares and typically hold them for years at a time. They have two interests in a stock: 1.) if the company pays dividends that those dividends are as large as possible; and 2.) the price of the stock itself will appreciate faster than the market average so the managers of those funds look smart to their investors.
Even if it doesn't seem like it, CEOs do have bosses, and they are the fund managers who own zillions and zillions of shares, enough such that if they get pissed enough they can vote in a new board of directors who will fire the CEO. These investors want to hold the stock for many years but they need to show regular evidence that the company's management is doing the "right thing," so they put pressure on to see each quarter's dividend payments to be equal or greater than the last quarter's, and for the company's share price to rise over time faster than inflation at a minimum, and faster than the market average ideally. So ultimately it is not a short term view but all companies do have short-term milestones along the way. So that's why it seems that every company's view is short term.
"95% of all Slashdot
Getting rid of crappy facebook applications is actually doing the opposite of evil. Google is doing Good here. Thanks Google!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
probably a few others.
I'm sure I've heard of Microsoft doing that a couple of times. And if they did not "extinguish" then they crippled the original product. Not always, but a number of times they did.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
LOL
I did learn this in Finance 101. The guy who taught the course was a former CFO of 2 fortune 500 companies in his career. Infact, he even had that question on the exam as the most important concept in the course. He even had, to make money and of course it was a wrong answer if you selected it.
Most of it dealt with ways to increase the liquidity to boast the share price and by how much netvalue wise and so on. Only small business cares about money. HFT flash systems and day traders are the majority of shareholders. These systems make up 70% of all volume today. That is who the company is responsible too and large institutional investors only care about its price and how much it can go up by a quarterly basis. They do not care long term as they will dump the stock and invest in another quickly and so on.
I wish it was not true, but sadly it is today. Things have changed in 10 years and I trust my professor who has a former CFO. He was a tough teacher but, he drove a corvette and laid it like it is about the goal of any major corporation that is publically traded.
http://saveie6.com/
Oh and to top if off after rereading your post ... dividends were taught as bad as that money is needed for liquidity to boast its share price. He also taught going in debt is a great thing as it gives great leverage. This I disagreed with as many companies got burned as this induced risk and no leverage if a recession hits.
These are taught today to young accountants and business students and believe me they have taken this lesson to work and run some of these companies. If you have an issue with cost accounting is god then please stay private.
http://saveie6.com/
Much like "a shower, a shit, and a shave," it's a temporally-unordered list.
I don't think things that harm Facebook can be considered evil. The evil bit is making their own locked-in information-harvesting service.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
If you're paying a dividend, then you're saying to your shareholders 'I think you can do more with this money than we can'. That's not a good message for a dynamic company to be sending, but it's fine for one in a fairly static position in an established market (i.e. a company in the cash cow phase).
As to keeping investors happy, there are two reasons why a company needs to care about its stock price, and it only needs to care if one or both of these apply:
It is using stock options to pay people. This is often a good idea, because it means that they are financially invested in the company's success, but it means that a drop in the share price is equivalent to giving your employees a pay cut, which is not good if you want to retain top talent.
They want to be able to raise more capital easily by issuing more shares in the future. When a company issues more shares, this dilutes the value of the existing ones. If a company issues $100,000 of new shares, but then uses this capital to increase in value by $200,000, then the existing investors won't see issuing more as a reason to sell, and the next time that they need capital they can issue more. If a company issues $100,000 of shares and doesn't increase in value, then everyone else's shares just became slightly less valuable, so it's not a good thing to own. As long as the share price is on an upwards trajectory, you can raise capital without lowering the value of the shares - you just slow the rate at which they gain value.
It's important not to lose sight of why the share price matters.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Google+ I've seen has a decent grab your shit link.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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).
It depends on the industry. Power utilities, for example, are essentially long term finance vehicles. They use the construction of power plants as the means to qcquire long term financing (bonds) at low rates, which they can leverage in the financial markets to increase profits. For them, it's important to maintain long term stable investment, so they tend to provide dividends rather than growth. Growth is pretty much fixed according to their monopoly situation. They also look at their stock as a kind of floating bond, and the dividends as interest on that 'debt'.
There have been some exceptions - Idaho Power was a particularly egregious example, where the new managers of a very stable mutual utility had dreams of glory and sold off their assets (dams, power lines, etc.) in order to get into the network game. They changed the name and built a bunch of fiber in the late 1990s just in time for the glut of fiber. So they ended up with thousands of miles of dark fiber, a huge debt, and power rates to their customers going through the roof. It all ended up fairly well - I forget the details but IIRC some german company bought their network/comms business and it became T-Mobile.
IMHO your professor is one of those asshats who went to B-school during the 1970s, when the 'greed is good' mantra got into the schools. He's just spouting the nonsense that he learned. Unfortunately one or two entire generations of executives were taught this, and it's been one of the factors that has really screwed things up world wide. It works great when times are good, but as we have seen it makes the company and the economy vulnerable to every shifting wind.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
wouldn't it make more sense to go out for a coke, a poke, THEN a smoke?
Depends on what you're smoking I suppose.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Getting rid of crappy facebook applications is actually doing the opposite of evil. Google is doing Good here. Thanks Google!
Except that this is most likely an effort to move this application(s) exclusively to Google+.
Bow before me, for I am root.
The moral issue I have with this reasoning is it is no longer an investment at this point but rather gambling.
If I handed you some monopoly money from the board game for $100 and told you its ok. John down the street might pay you $120 for that so I would keep it. Meanwhile I pocket the change.
Stocks without dividends are technical worthless pieces of paper with a company name printed on it. Who cares how much money that company makes as long as someone else might think it would be worth more. This is also called a pyramid or Ponzi pyramid scheme. Yes, the company generates revenue but you never see it.
It is akin to you and me going into business together where I take all the cash and give you nothing.
In a perfect world, it would be law to require companies pay dividends. This would eliminate volatility and encourage Wall Street to think more long term. It would make the economy healthier as many Grandmas have retirement accounts with these sharks that do not pay dividends at all.
http://saveie6.com/
They can have them. Who cares? Particularly, who on Slashdot cares?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Stocks without dividends are technical worthless pieces of paper with a company name printed on it
No they're not. They're ownership of some percentage of the company. If you buy a bar of gold, an acre of land, or a barrel of oil, they don't pay a dividend either, but you still own something which you believe has value and can later sell to someone else who believes that it has value. You buy them because you believe that they are a safer store of wealth than currency. Modern currencies intentionally inflate to encourage this perception and to make it more attractive to invest your money in companies that produce wealth than store it in money under your mattress.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You see? That's the kind of attitude that made Facebook the omnipotent privacy killer it is now.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Still not caring all that much. Google+ is keeping Facebook in line.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.