What Happened on the Web in Spring 2011?
They say a year is pretty big in the tech world and what exists now, may not exist in a year or two. Think about what happened in your life during the past year, can you remember all of that? What happened on the Internet?
There were some big things happening in the spring of 2011, so let’s take a trip – back to the future!
Microsoft Buys Skype For $8.5 Billion
Yep, this happened about a year ago. Microsoft decided to buy Skype, a platform which popularized VoIP technology and made internet telephony available to everyone with an Internet connection. It was an all-cash deal, unlike more popular option of cash-shares ratio.
As GigaOM says, the sale was up for some time and Microsoft wasn’t the only one interested in buying Skype, Facebook and Google were also in the race:
Skype has been up for sale for some time, thanks to some very antsy investors. My sources indicated both eBay and Silver Lake Partners have been getting nervous about the delayed initial public offering and have been pushing for a sale of Skype. Facebook and Google were said to be earlier dance partners for Skype, and Microsoft was a late entrant and is now close to walking away with the prize.
It won’t surprise me if Microsoft comes in for major heat on this decision to buy Skype — and the software company could always botch this purchase, as it often does when it buys a company. The Skype team is also full of hired guns who are likely to move on to the next opportunity rather than dealing with the famed Microsoft bureaucracy.
There were predictions on how Microsoft will destroy Skype and whatnot – however, we’re still skyping and so are you!
Twitter Buys TweetDeck For $40 Million
Ah, TweetDeck, one of the best desktop Twitter clients ever was sold to Twitter for a sum of $40 million. It’s a long story actually. TweetDeck was almost bought by UberMedia, a company which produced UberTwitter, a popular BlackBerry Twitter client. Twitter simply didn’t want to allow that and before they lost the biggest gem of Twitter clients, they rushed in and got it for $10 million more than UberMedia was offering. TechCrunch has the story:
It seems that Twitter just wasn’t comfortable with allowing UberMedia to snatch another chunk of market share. After all, Twitter can’t just go allowing Twitter-related startups and products to fall into the hands of those companies that aren’t Twitter. Just ask UberTwitter and EchoFon, for example. As Mike reported in early May, sources close to Twitter revealed that an UberMedia acquisition would give them too much leverage over Twitter, and so the bidding war (or really, non-war) was on.
However, it seems that Twitter did destroy TweetDeck, along with Tweetie, a popular iPhone Twitter client. It’s still being used all over the twitterverse, however, it’s not the app we used to know anymore.
Google Introduced +1
In the spring of 2011, Google started its own social networking story, presenting us with the “plus-one” button you could integrate on your sites. Of course, if you’d give a +1 to an article on some site, your Google contacts would know about it if that article came up in their searches.
It all started as a recommendation system, as a rival to Facebook’s Like button. However, it turned out that plus-one was just a prelude to Google Plus.
What else do you remember from 2011? Was there an important detail we missed? Tell us in the comments!
