Slide

One of the largest social widget and application platforms of the late 2000s, reaching over 150 million monthly unique users across MySpace and Facebook

Slide was a San Francisco-based technology company founded by Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, that became one of the most prominent social application developers of the mid-to-late 2000s. The company built viral social widgets and applications — including slideshow tools, SuperPoke!, FunSpace, and Top Friends — that were distributed across major social networks like MySpace and Facebook. At its peak, Slide claimed to reach over 150 million unique users monthly, making it one of the largest application platforms on the social web and a significant player in the emerging social advertising ecosystem. Slide monetized its massive user base primarily through display advertising embedded within its social widgets and applications, positioning itself as a unique social advertising network that could reach users across multiple platforms simultaneously. The company raised substantial venture capital and was widely considered one of the hottest startups of its era, with a valuation reportedly reaching $500 million at its height. However, as Facebook began tightening its platform policies and the open widget ecosystem began to consolidate, Slide's growth stalled and its advertising model came under pressure. In 2010, Google acquired Slide for approximately $182 million, primarily to bolster its social networking ambitions and bring Levchin's engineering talent in-house. Google integrated some of Slide's technology into its nascent Google+ social network, but the Slide brand and its standalone products were gradually wound down. By 2011, Google had shut down most of Slide's consumer-facing products, and the Slide entity effectively ceased to exist as a distinct brand, marking the end of one of the defining companies of the early social web advertising era.