Google buys SocialDeck, its 20th acquisition in 2010

Google has acquired Canadian mobile social gaming company SocialDeck, the latest in a series of recent social media purchases by the Internet giant.

SocialDeck is the fifth company to be acquired by Google in the month of August. Last week,Google had bought Angstro, a service that combines a user's connections across various social networks. Google's other acquisitions this month include social games developer Slide, virtual payment company Jambool, and visual search company Like. SocialDeck, founded in 2008 makes gaming apps for Facebook, iPhone and BlackBerry, which enables users to play across multiple mobile devices and social networks simultaneously.Some of SocialDeck's games include "Shake & Spell," "Pet Hero MD," and "Color Connect." which saw more than one million mobile downloads in 2009. SocialDeck confirmed the deal in its blog.

Big news. We're super excited to announce that someone found our social games as fun as you have -- in this case, that 'someone' is Google. SocialDeck has been acquired and we've joined the Google team.

It's believed that Google is trying to build a social-networking service to counter the growth of Facebook which is on its way to become the most visited site on the web. Ttechnology blog Zdnet reports,

It appears, in fact, that Google intends to out-fun Facebook when it launches its own social platform (presumably called Google Me). This actually makes quite a bit of sense from a revenue and social graph perspective, though.