Google acquires social network, The Fridge

The social network Fridge announced that it has been bought by Google and would become part of the internet giant’s fresh new social network Google+.

In a post on its blog, Fridge announced that it was closing, and its staff would be “folded into” the Google+ team. Fridge had previously announced to its users they were “in the process of making some changes” and that planning “to to shut down our product”.

According to the post, Fridge was looking forward to continuing the vision of creating exciting “social group experiences across the web” and that their team” strongly believes in the group social experience and couldn’t think of a better place to realize our vision” than with Google+.

As pointed out on CNet’s analysis on the surprising acquisition, “It’s an interesting move for Google+, whose signature feature is its circles, which are managed by each person rather than as collaborative groups”, which is how Fridge worked.

According to AFP, there were reportedly 20 000 groups on Fridge and it had some 40 000 users monthly.

To those users, Fridge said in it’s post, “We heard you loud and clear over the weekend,[when they announced they were closing] so we’re expanding the time during which your Fridge data will be available for offloading. While you will no longer be able to post anything new to Fridge, you will still be able to download and save your data until Saturday August 20, 2011”.

As is the norm with Google’s acqisitions financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, however, according to a 2010 report on Techcrunch, Fridge had, at that time, raised some US$500 000 in funding from angel investors.

However, in the haste of shutting down and being “folded into Google+”, as the post said, it would seem Fridge — at the time of writing — had forgotten to take down it’s YouTube videos explaining “What is Fridge”.

In both — only the first can be verified as being an “official” Fridge video as it is posted on the Fridge website — along with pointing out that “my groups in the Fridge are totally private, so only certain people can see certain groups,” it goes on to say, “My family, friends, and I, can share whatever we want, without worrying about other people or groups seeing it. Not that random person from school, not Google, and especially not my boss”.

The second video, goes on to say, “on the Fridge, you can choose to be good or as naughty as you want without having to be afraid of your mom, boss, or even Google finding out about those crazy party times”.

Quoted by AFP, a spokesperson for Google in part said “the Fridge team shares our vision”.