The Google Buys The Fridge

Adrianne Jeffries — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:18:31 -0400

Last time we talked to Dogpatch Labs-based The Fridge, a private, closed social network incubated at Y Combinator, co-founder Austin Chang was chugging along trying to get The Fridge adopted by classrooms and institutions and trying to hire another engineer; the start-up was pushing updates as recently as last month. But labor in limbo no longer! Google has acqui-hired The Fridge team and plans to use some of the technology to augment Google+. "We look forward to continuing the vision of creating fresh and exciting social group experiences for users across the web," the company said on its blog.

While The Fridge was adopted by techies at Y Combinator, Dogpatch Labs, WeWork Labs as well as some of the staff at Parsons School of Design, capturing conversations between mainstream consumer users at the scale of a Facebook or Twitter seemed like a stretch. Still, top investors saw strong promise. The Fridge was backed by Y-Combinator, Polaris Ventures, Keith Rabois, AngelList's Naval Ravikant, Mitch Kapoor, Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, Yahoo's Ash Patel, the del.icio.us Joshua Schachter, and others.

Betabeat » The Google Buys The Fridge

The Google Buys The Fridge