It’s official: Google is acquiring social collaboration platform Jambool. The company behind Social Gold, a virtual currency platform, was rumored to have been snapped up by the search engine giant earlier this week. A post today on Jambool’s company blog confirms the deal, though none of the financial details were given.
From Jambool,
“We are excited to announce that Jambool is becoming a part of the Google family today. Jambool started as a social collaboration platform in 2006. In 2007, we shifted our focus to build applications on social networks. Along with success, we found fun and lucrative ways to monetize our apps – specifically virtual currency and goods. That led us to create a platform to help developers create, host, manage and monetize their virtual economies.”
The acquisition is significant for Google as it aggressively builds a foundation for social gaming and related applications. As Jambool mentioned, monetization is an important aspect of social networks, and games have shown a great deal of promise in this regard.
Google’s other recent developments in the social gaming overlap include an investment in Zynga, the purchase of Slide and the backing of Ngmoco. Not only is Google padding up its resources and development teams, but its buying into prime placement for a widespread social and mobile presence. Zynga and Slide are quite popular on Facebook, while Ngmoco has a following with iPhone users, lesser so with Android’s platform.
To that end, Google will have a decent starting team for building out its social gaming initiatives, prepping early on for advertising and other forms of montization. Its Android and Chrome projects are prime channels for distribution, and the serious nature of Google’s drive may have helped to encourage the anticipated on-boarding of Owen Van Natta as a Zynga executive and board member.
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