With the release of Google Buzz, Google has been catching a lot of attention lately for making a big social media play. But let’s not forget that Google has been in the social media game for some time, developing social tools and acquiring social media companies left and right. (See Google Already Social) Google’s first social media acquisition was the purchase of Blogger (Pyra Labs) way back in 2003. Here’s a look at the six most recent social media company purchases by Google starting with the most recent.

1. Aardvark – A social search engine that answers your questions by asking real people in your extended network
Price: $50M
Date Acquired: 2/12/2010
Website: http://www.vark.com
Why: Search has always been at the heart of everything Google. As the social web grows, a social search engine is a natural integration for the search giant. This purchase fits nicely into Google’s mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

2. AppJet – Makers of Etherpad, a real time web-based word processor
Price: Undisclosed
Date Acquired: 12/4/2009
Website: http://etherpad.com/
Why: The leg up that Etherpad had over Google Docs was that there wasn’t a 15 second lag between edits. On top of that, many of the staff members of AppJet were former Google employees. It appears that now the AppJet team has joined with the Google Wave team to increase the quality of the Google Wave product.

3. TNC (Tatter and Company) – Korean blogging software
Price: Undisclosed
Date Acquired: 9/12/2008
Why: This Korean play was two-fold. First, Google acquired a very popular and powerful blogging platform in Korea (Textcube) that had yet to be globalized. Second, Google’s search market share in Korea has been miniscule compared to other places in the world (less than 5% in 2009 according to an article in the Economist). Considering that Korea is the world’s sixth largest market in terms of internet users, it’s easy to see why Google is so interested in increasing their popularity within the country.

4. Ominsio – Adds content to video
Price: $15M
Date Acquired: 07/30/2008
Website: http://www.omnisio.com/ Why: The purchase of Ominsio added the ability to comment at particular time stamps within YouTube videos. This increases the social aspects of YouTube and enables more interaction with the community and the videos being watched (it also can be very annoying at times).

5. Jaiku – Micro-blogging service in Finland that allows real time status updates to be sent to friends cell phones
Price: Undisclosed
Date Acquired: 10/9/2007
Website: http://www.jaiku.com/
Why: More collaboration and connection via text messages. People often wonder if Google made a blunder by purchasing Jaiku instead of Twitter. Google has since integrated aspects of Jaiku into Google Mobile. Development was halted in 2009.

6. Zingku – Powerful text messaging tools to connect with large groups
Price: Undisclosed
Date Acquired: 9/27/2007
Website: http://www.zingku.com
Why: Zingku has powerful social media elements allowing users to send text messages to groups, take polls via text messages, and interact with your own personal website using SMS. These features have since been integrated into Google Mobile.

Summary:
Of all of the social media purchases buy Google in recent years, you can see that Google is continuing to connect with its users in as many ways as possible. With all this interconnectivity the implications for social search and knowledge sharing is staggering. The future of Google search results will further blur the line between static web pages and real-time dynamics.