MappingTheWeb //

Try and say that 10 times fast.

Google is on a buying spree. Up until this past year, Google has been very weary when it comes to acquisitions. That all changed. With YouTube, Writely, and now JotSpot among many others, Google is making a much more aggressive push in the acquisition area. However, the old dilemma still holds true - whether to build a product/service from scratch or just buy an existing company at a premium. But with cash like Google and aggressive plans, it seems that the former option is the preferred.

Today, the company bought JotSpot, a wiki service founded by Excite-founder Joe Kraus. Financial terms of the deal were not released, but I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the price tag was around $30 million - but don’t hold me to it by any means.

With this acquisition, Google continues to make an aggressive push into the social application arena. Mash this together with Writely, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Calendar, and you have a full web-based social application suite. Robust, powerful. For this very reason, I think that the acquisition is a good fit for Google (Steve Rubel agrees), assuming the price tag was reasonable.

Here is an interesting note on the deal from TechCrunch:

“Other than a wiki, most of Jotspot’s plug and play applications are things that Google already has its own versions of. The acquisition may have been largely motivated by the desire to bring on board an agile team able to quickly ramp up lightweight hosted business applications for collaboration. Google may push Jotspot primarily as a project management application, one of the most important missing pieces of the company’s office platform. In fact, far more than a wiki, I’m going to guess that when Google reopens Jotspot to new users it will be as a wiki based project management service.”

Let’s just hope that the name G-Spot doesn’t stick - no pun intended.