Forget Youtube–do they own you yet? Some handy guides to Google acquisitions

On the advice of a friend, the Mole journeyed this morning to Grand Central to check out their digital telephony-and-recording tools–only to find that the company has been acquired by Google and is currently (irony of ironies) in invitation-only beta mode.

While trying to wrangle an invitation, we decided to check into the question of Google’s acquisitions over the past year. There seems to be no definitive answer; as Pete Cashmore writes at Mashable, “it’s extremely hard to get good data on Google acquisitions.” However, he adds, “We’re told that Google may actually be doing more than 1 acquisition per week at the moment, many of them small.”

More:

• Peter Abilla at Shmula offers a cool timeline on Google’s acquisitions, with scroll-over annotations about the companies the G-men bought, here.
• Cashmore’s post at Mashable includes a sharable, user-modifiable Excel spreadsheet on Google’s conquests, here.
• Wikipedia’s page on the subject includes a lengthy table and nearly 50 reference links to stories on Google purchases, here.

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