Social search & marketing leads in M&A

eBay announced on Monday that it will buy GSI Commerce, an ecommerce and interactive marketing services company, for $2.4 billion.

Google leads all other major technology companies by acquiring 23 companies in 2010, compared to IBM’s 12, Facebook’s 6, and Microsoft’s 0. http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-acquired-23-companies-this-year-microsoft-acquires-zero-20100929/

LivingSocial Will Overtake Groupon in January 2012 http://mashable.com/2011/03/24/livingsocial-says-it-will-overtake-groupon-in-january-2012/

Humans gravitate towards tools they've used before and those tools stay in the same place, that's a companies URL. There are the places they go to shop, their favorite weather site, the place they watch random videos, their bank, their localities website, etc. When those sites fail to be organized, they revert back to searching the garbage heap of the web (i.e. search engines).

People are not per se authorities on anything in the social world other than how to waste time and where the lemmings now are headed to follow each other off a fashionable cliff. While social has it's place, it isn't exactly content rich or a place to perform research on most matters.

http://futurerating.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-social-is-changing-internet.html