Slide, Inc., operator of the Slide.com website, was a Web 2.0 company founded by Max Levchin and based in San Francisco, California. Originally formed to make photo sharing software for social networking services such as MySpace, the company achieved its greatest success as the largest developer of third-party applications for Facebook. The company was acquired by Google on August 4, 2010 and shut down on March 6, 2012.
History[]
Slide was begun as a project in 2004 and formed in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who personally invested $1 million in the new company.
Slide was one of the companies invited to participate in F8, the event at which Facebook announced an open platform allowing third parties to develop and operate their own software applications on the Facebook website.
Slide's first institutional funder was the Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture capital firm operated by former PayPal executive Peter Thiel to invest in Web 2.0 start-ups. Subsequent investors included the Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, and BlueRun Ventures. In January 2008, Slide received a further $50 million in financing from undisclosed institutional investors, rumored to be Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. The investment was based on a $500 million valuation.
Many Slide applications were blocked in Turkey in March 2008 after a local court there ruled that Slide was not censoring user-generated content seen as derogatory to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk per Turkish law.
In 2009 the company officially changed its business model from an ad network to a sponsored content service, by which brands would pay $500,000 to $1 million each for sponsorship placement.
On August 6, 2010, Google agreed to buy Slide.com for $182 million, as well as an extra $46 million in employee retention bonuses. Founder Levchin, who had invested $7 million of his own money into the company, received $39 million from the acquisition.
On August 26, 2011, Google announced that it was shutting the doors on Slide.
Products[]
Slide was formed to develop and run a service users would download for their network browsers that would organize photos on their computers and post them to personal blogs. Later, Slide began to make application widgets for online social network platforms. Several of Slide's plug-in applications such as "FunWall", "Fortune Cookie", "My Questions", "Top Friends", and "SuperPoke!" became, at various times, among the most popular applications on Facebook. As of late 2007 Slide's principal competitor was RockYou.
In April 2008, Slide introduced "SuperPoke! Pets", a popular application that allowed its users to care for and buy things for virtual pets; the app ran for over four years until it was shut down on March 6, 2012 along with many other Slide products.
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