Another form of this question I am trying to answer is when your favorite site gets acquired (I don’t mean lil ones like Wisdump, but large players like last.fm) is it always a bad thing? When Myspace was acquired by Fox Interactive Media many expected a huge corporate fallout because Myspace had gone corporate. That hasn’t happened. When Yahoo acquired Flickr, many expected the same, but the worst thing to happen was that Yahoo required you to login with a Yahoo ID.
Why is it people never think that being acquired by a larger company is a good thing because it gives the site they love more resources to work with and possibly move the company further along? Then again, how much activity do you really see from sites after being acquired? To me this is the bad thing about being acquired. It is not that anything major changes, the sites generally go untouched in today’s acquisitions because the larger companies are starting to understand that is what is best. However, the acquired company seems to be content with what has happened and maybe they feel they can take their foot of the pedal now.
Can anyone think of any examples of successful Web 2.0 sites that got acquired and then bombed afterwards?
Originally posted on June 1, 2007 @ 12:21 pm