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It is almost 2008, and something in my guts tells me that it is going to be a big “WEB” year.

It occurred to me today though, whose next on Google’s shopping list?

I mean look at the acquisitions done already by these guys, 47 acquisitions between 2001 and 2007, lots which had undisclosed value, and lots of relatively small businesses, leaving us only the big whales to hear about loudly in public – the billions deals, like the 5% share in AOL and YouTube, and the popular ones like Picassa and Feedburner and so on.

The last proposal ($3.1B) was for DoubleClick, under negotiation now!

Man these guys really know what they are doing and who they are buying. Why would they buy DoubleClick you might ask? Well the quick answer is to earn money ofcourse like every other corporate’s mission in life.

The strategic answer would be: taking over the biggest share in Online Advertising / Digital Marketing, can you imagine only the amount of ads served worldwide accross multiple digital mediums through DoubleClick?

These guys have been taking step after the other to gain control of huge disciplines in the web industry, if you watch the trend, it is always a series of small tactical acquisitions, followed by a huge one that leads to almost full control of a sector.

So back to the question, who is next in line?

I think sensible targets would be:

Technorati ? Technorati is a blog portal where you find interesting posts from blogs worldwide, I mean every blogger wants to be listed on Technorati and it has become the blogging standard. It is geeks heaven, and it integrates well with blogger.

del.icio.us ? This social bookmarking and tagging application integrates beautifully with search engines in general, and with Google results in particular. It is big as well and would make such great PR with Google’s trend in liking tags recently.

StumbleUpon ? This unique browser plugin and service would enhance Google’s one, both already share a lot.

Last.fm ? They done Video, and still not associated with music, so who is bigger and more popular than Last.fm?

Monster ? The biggest of them all job portals online, there is almost a version for every country, and it is the standard nowadays, great step towards owning online recruitment category.

Answers.com ? Anyone notices that Google is more likely to provide definitions from Answers.com rather than dictionary.com lately? These guys are not open source as well, they make money which means a revenue source, and is already integrating within Google search results, how innocent is that dominance?

Mazenville.com ? They wish

Well I am sure we will hear something, and the image will become clearer, and if not Google, then the other usual suspects are queuing in line.

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