Pageflakes Acquired By LiveUniverse: Further Push Into Social Networking
AJAX start page provider Pageflakes officially announced today that it has been acquired by LiveUniverse. The deal is a combination of cash and stock, but the size of the acquisition was not disclosed. LiveUniverse, which was founded by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, owns a number of social networking and video destinations, most notably LiveVideo. Rumors of this deal surfaced earlier this week, and it was officially announced today.
LiveUniverse is on an acquisition streak of late, having acquired video sharing site Revver for just under $5 million in February. While it may seem that Pageflakes is a little outside of their core business, we think the transaction is an intriguing one.
Along with Greenspan, LiveUniverse has original MySpace engineer Toan Nguyen on its management team. That's some serious chops in the area of social networking, which is where Pageflakes has been heading since the "Blizzard" update last July. We speculated then that Pageflakes was aiming to take on social networks by adding interaction features and networking among users, which is an idea that we initially advanced in a piece we published last May.
"Both Netvibes and Pageflakes already act as platforms, with sophisticated developers APIs for creating widgets and programs to interact with their users," we wrote in May of the two leading AJAX start page companies. "Both companies allow users to customize their pages, and inject personality into them. Both companies also already encourage users to share their creations (Universes and Pagecasts). Perhaps, the next step beyond sharing should be interaction."
Pageflakes started to do that last summer, but perhaps bringing Greenspan and Nguyen into the mix will push Pageflakes further into social networking territory. The first tie-in between the two companies, according to a press release, will be to use Pageflakes' page customization technologies to enhance the social networking aspects of the LiveVideo site.
We're hoping that the two cook up a lot more than that. A quote from Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen in the press release about the acquisition seemed to hint at bigger things on the horizon: "The combination of our two companies is truly much bigger than the sum of its parts, and the resulting innovation will be highly compelling for our users and partners."
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after reading this stuff and from some other websites i found that these two websites are different and let's see what coming to our door after the merger of these two web portals.
This looks to be a solid deal for both parties. From what I know about the market, there are some exciting developments that this partnership can support.
Any thoughts/leaks on cash amount LU paid ?
Cool. Now I can expect even more from pageflakes. Look forward to it.
Congrats Pageflakes, well done. You guys built a great product and we're looking forward to a lot more.
@1 Ajay: Check out the Pageflakes Blog, they are linking to a Beta of a "LiveStart" personal start page on www.LiveVideo.com (also at livevideo.pageflakes.com).
This is actually very interesting. You have Netvibes out there adding a social network to a personalized start page, while LiveVideo is adding a personalized start page to a social network. I think the latter makes a lot more sense - think about Facebook. What they did was essentially build a personal start page based on widgets when they launched their platform, when they already had millions of users. So, if you think about it, it's really smart to add widget aggregation and personalization to social networks. Not sure that the inverse, Netvibes Ginger, makes any sense, though.
Bringing personal start page to an existing social network would definitely create a more engaging experience for its users. Nonetheless, the LiveStart feature is a promising product. I can't wait to see how LiveUniverse plans to integrate Pageflakes' features into its other existing media properties.
Bringing a personal start page to an existing social network would definitely create a more engaging experience for its users. Nonetheless, the LiveStart feature is a promising product. I can't wait to see how LiveUniverse plans to integrate Pageflakes' features into its other existing media properties.
Pageflakes is already a great product, looking forward to future improvements.