Slide

Former leading social application developer on Facebook and MySpace platforms

Slide was a personal media-sharing service company founded by Max Levchin that created widgets and applications for social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The company developed popular social applications including SuperPoke!, FunWall, and Top Friends, which were among the most widely used third-party applications on Facebook during the late 2000s. Slide represented an early wave of social media advertising and engagement platforms that monetized through display advertising within their applications. Google acquired Slide in August 2010 for approximately $182 million, marking one of Google's largest acquisitions at the time. The acquisition was part of Google's strategy to strengthen its social networking capabilities and compete with Facebook. However, the integration proved unsuccessful, and Google shut down Slide's operations in 2012 as part of a broader consolidation of its social products. Slide's significance in the AdTech ecosystem was its pioneering role in social media advertising and viral distribution through widget-based applications. The company demonstrated early monetization models for social applications through display advertising and virtual goods, influencing the development of social advertising platforms that followed.