Google Acquires Content-Sharing Startup Kifi

Google is a lot of things, but in the world of social media it's still widely considered an incidental player. That might change with the announcement this week that Google's parent company Alphabet has acquired Mountain View, Calif-based Kifi, a start up Web site link-sharing platform. Kifi could possibly help the tech giant beef up its Google Spaces social media platform. Google Spaces aims to be the app individuals use to share content in groups on any topic. Group-sharing app KiFi has Google Search, YouTube and Chrome built into it. The details of the acquisition haven't been released, but Kifi said that part of its team will immediately start working on Google Spaces. That might dovetail with the general idea behind Kifi, which is to add context to collaboration efforts to somewhat ease the process of organizing and using information for a variety of group projects and interests. Kifi has also developed tools for contextualizing stored information, including a deep search engine for Twitter content and links. But Rand Fishkin, founder of Seattle-based SEO consulting company Moz, told us that it's important to be cautious in ascribing a motive to any of Google's small acquisitions like this one. "It could be a pure 'acquihire,' a use of Kifi's technology for a function entirely separate from its original use, or even an experiment that will never see a public launch," he said. "I wouldn't make any assumptions that Google's going deeper in the content production or distribution space based solely on this move." Team To Move Over Launched on May 16, Google Spaces is s a way to make group sharing easier for everyone from book clubs to work groups by enabling them to avoid jumping between apps to copy and paste links. With Google Spaces, group members can see whenever someone shares something new to a space, and the app’s conversational view lets users immediately see what the group is talking about without having to wade through a long thread. Neither company has revealed how many Kifi employees will be joining Google. However, on his Google Plus page, Google engineering director Eddie Kessler said the Kifi team has a great deal of expertise that will help Google, noting "their great expertise in organizing shared content and conversations." That could be helpful to Google Spaces, whose focus now is more on group chat capabilities. The Latest Startup Kifi was founded in 2012 by Dan Blumenfeld and Eishay Smith. The company’s early goal was to provide a consumer-centric experience of group activities and collaboration. In a post on Medium announcing the transaction, Kifi said that some of its services will soon be phased out. But even after the current iteration of Kifi is shut down, users will still have time to transfer their data to another platform of their choice, the company noted. "We see a lot of alignment to Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," According to Kifi. "Our team will be joining the Spaces team at Google to build solutions focused on improving group sharing, conversation, and content finding." The transaction seems to fit in with Google’s recent acquisition strategy, which has focused on small startup companies that have developed novel ideas or technologies that are easier for Google to purchase rather than develop on its own. Just in the past month, the company has bought Internet service provider Webpass, French image recognition company Moodstocks and cloud-based video service provider Anvato.