ReadWriteWeb

Google Plus, the ambitious company-wide social network launched late last month, was reportedly built in secret over an extended period of time by scores of engineers and social software designers brought into the company through a campaign of heavy hiring.

The scope of Plus's ambition is far from fully realized, though, and apparently the expansion of the team isn't complete yet either. This morning a well-backed little startup called The Fridge announced that it has been acquired by Google and will close its group sharing app up to work on something similar at Plus. It was the second little startup like it to be acquired by Google in the last two days: yesterday YCombinator alum Scoopler/Just Spotted announced the same thing.

Did these little startups show promise and get multi-million dollar signing bonuses, effectively, as acquisition/hires? Or did they see the successful launch of Google Plus as writing on the wall: that the real time and group sharing market has now matured enough that it's time for anyone small to team up with a giant if they are going to survive? Maybe they began building a year ago with insiders' knowledge that flipping to Google would become an increasingly viable strategy.

If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a "Request for Startups" (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv's live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given "priority access" to Twitter and Justin.tv.

Current real-time search engines generally focus on just searching a single service - and typically, that service is Twitter. Scoopler, however, a Y Combinater-funded startup which launched today after a short private beta, goes far beyond that. Scoopler is a real-time meta-search tool for Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious, with support for more services to follow in the future. As one would expect, search results from Twitter dominate the real-time stream, though, depending on the topic, the most interesting links often come from delicious or digg.