Google Acquires Odysee Photo Platform
Google continues to buy its way through Silicon Valley, having acquired photo backup platform Odysee this past weekend. According to a post on Odysee’s website, the company’s app will continue to run for the next couple of weeks, but on February 23, the service will be shut down once Odysee joins the Google+ team.
“We are excited to share that the Odysee Platform Team will be joining the Google+ Team.
Odysee’s vision was to be the easiest way for everyone to capture unlimited memories and access them everywhere. We are very excited to join Google where we’ll continue to focus on building amazing products that people love.
Our deepest thanks to every one of our users. To help you with the transition, the Odysee service will continue till Feb 23rd and soon after that all your photos and videos will be available as a downloadable archive.”
Odysee allowed users to sync and back up their photos and videos to their computers and share their content with others. Now that it’s being rolled into Google+, it’ll be interesting to see what changes Google makes to its social network. It stands to reason that whatever Google’s plans are, it’ll likely be designed to help Google+ better compete with Facebook’s standalone photo-sharing social network, Instagram.
With the cutoff of February 23, perhaps Odysee will have an impact on Google’s social networking plans soon after that. More likely, however, we won’t see this acquisition bear fruit for a few months at least. When Google bought Songza last year, it took a while for that company’s curated music playlists to start showing up in Google Play. However, Google has also kept Songza going since the acquisition, so with Odysee getting shut down, we have a pretty different scenario going on here. Either way, when Google makes a move like this, there’s a plan at work. Hopefully we’ll find out what that plan is sooner rather than later…
[Odysee Announcement via TechCrunch]