Google Angstro purchase another piece of social networking tool

The LA Times reported last week that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) had bought social start-up Angstro, adding another piece to its social networking strategy. Angstro, a company that, according to its website, aims to find a highly relevant set of results from a defined set of sites. The website differentiates itself from Google in the following way:

"Where search engines such as Google and other news aggregator services have immense infrastructures that return a huge array of random results, Ångströ analyses a wide breadth of information from multiple data sources to deliver very few, yet very intelligent results."

It's the kind of company that sounds like it could appeal to Google as it brings its social media team together. The company has strived to find ways to make social networks interoperable. In a blog post on the company site, founder Rohit Khare stated that he had sold the company and would be joining the Google team:

"While our work here may be done, the struggle for open, interoperable social networks is still only just beginning, and I'm looking forward to working on that in my new role at Google."

Jessica Guynn, the writer credited with breaking this story writes that Khare should be an important part of the team that will build Google's social networking tool: Google Me. "Khare has created a number of products that will be very useful to Google, including one that exports information from Facebook and other social networks. Angstro built a service that scoured the web and the blogosphere for news about your friends from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and delivered it to you."

It seems likely that Google isn't looking necessarily to mimic Facebook, but to play to its own strengths as a search company to pull information from a variety of sources and perhaps build a central social dashboard. This purchase could help achieve such a goal. How and if that comes to fruition is unknown, but as Google pulls together a team of the best and the brightest, you know something interesting is going to come out of it. They just have to avoid the Google Wave geek trap and build something that works for the masses.

For more information:
- see the Angstro blog post
- see Jessica Guynn's LA Times post

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