Skype To Acquire GroupMe For Group Messaging

Skype has agreed to acquire group messaging app start-up GroupMe, the companies announced Sunday.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but the price has been reported at $80 million to $85 million. GroupMe’s users will be added to Skype’s 175 million users.

Founded just last year, GroupMe enables people to message each other for free over mobile devices. The company had raised $11.5 million from General Catalyst Partners, Vinod Khosla‘s Khosla Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

Skype itself is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Skype’s and Microsoft’s competitors in this space include Facebook, Google and Apple, which are also seeking to strengthen the communications pieces of their social strategies. Facebook recently launched its own group messaging app, Messenger, based on Beluga, a start-up that it acquired. Google has Google Voice, Google+ and its Huddle chat feature, and Apple has announced iMessage for its next iOS5, which is its own free private messaging service for people who use iOS devices.

Group messaging is an area of interest for Skype, since many people, particularly the younger demographic, have adopted free messaging apps such as GroupMe. Other competitors include Gogii’s TextPlus, Pinger’s TextFree and WhatsApp.

Communication has moved from the telephone landline to the mobile phone to Internet telephony with Skype to now apps like GroupMe with mobile communications services which do not rely on a PC or telephone number. They point to future services that integrate mobile messaging, instant messaging, email and voice, all in one, that can be accessed from any device.

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Google+ has to Fight its Short-comings to Pounce on Competitors

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Tech blogger Robert Scoble takes on the ”noisy stream” problem in his blog. He says, “Already for high flow users, like me, notifications are useless there and finding the good stuff, and good people, is very difficult (getting rid of people who don’t add value is also too difficult). I am missing private messages sent to me.”

When a post receives a lot of activity, Google+ moves it to the top of the stream, which is a way of publicizing new content. This can be irritating to people who are not interested in these posts and there is an overcrowding of posts. The broadcasting platform Twitter tries to identify the activity that interests the user and shows when people retweet the message and also the messages you follow.

Getting publicity for a post seems to be easier with Google+ as publishers of content pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and onsite advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick. Search rankings will be increased by posting contents on Google+. But to get publicity in Google+ the publishers must add new content and find ways to attract audiences to drive traffic.

Google+ has recently added some games in its library to beat the biggest revenue earner for Facebook, but there seems to be some privacy issue with that as well. To access a game, the users have to allow the game and the developer to have access to some information of the user’s account. This could put personal information and privacy in risk as somebody else in the users’ circle can grant permission to access these information, says PCWorld.

Google+ also is discouraging some potential users by insisting on real names. Many people use pseudonyms to maintain privacy.

Still, the site is a fresh entry in the social networking arena and it can profit from feedback from its users.

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