A company that Google bought for $200 million just a year ago is now being shut down. AllThingsD.com reports that Google has closed its San Francisco based Slide division and that the original founder of Slide, Max Levchin, (who also founded PayPal) will also be leaving Google. In a statement from Google, the company confirmed both moves and added, " ... Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities."
Slide was founded back in 2005 and created a number of apps for Facebook and other social networking services such as SuperPoke!. Google bought the company in August 2010. However it looks like none of the apps created by Slide, including the ones made under Google"s watch, were very successful. The report claims that Slide"s app programs will be shut down in the next few months.
It sounds like Google is putting most of its social networking efforts into Google+, which launched earlier this summer and has already signed up tens of millions of users. By contrast, Slide"s apps didn"t bring in the audience that Google+ has captured. Despite this, the Slide division just launched a new app last week. The Photoline app for the iPhone allowed people to collect groups of photos, or "vines", and put captions on them that have common themes or interests. Another new app created by the Slide team under Google is Disco, which offers people a way to text chat with groups of up to 99 different people.