Meet ‘Disco’, The Group Texting App Built Secretly Inside Google
It seems like Google has made a foray into the group messaging space today with Disco, a new iPhone app and website. Well, they sort of have. — The service utilizes the Disco.com domain that Google bought at Domainfest last year for $255K.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's appetite for social has been an open question for years — commentary as far back as 2007 argued the company could yet dominate social networking if it committed to it. Disco is the most concrete answer since: a group texting service for iPhone and web, built in secret inside the company rather than announced through the usual product pipeline.
Two details signal intent beyond experiment. Google paid $255K for the Disco.com domain at Domainfest last year, and TechCrunch's companion writeup traces the app to Slide, the social-applications team operating under Google's roof. The launch also lands mid-March amid a flurry of Google activity — withholding Honeycomb's source code, internal testing of Google Music, and a corporate development exec pledging the acquisition spree continues.
First-order effects
- iPhone users gain a Google-backed group texting app, giving the company its first foothold in a messaging behavior none of its shipped products addressed.
- Launching iOS-first — in the same week Google withheld Android Honeycomb's source from the community — puts Google's open-platform rhetoric and its actual app distribution choices in visible tension.
Second-order effects
- Group conversations migrating to data-based apps erode carriers' per-message SMS economics, pushing mobile pricing further toward flat data plans.
- Well-funded group messaging startups now face an entrant that spent $255K on a domain alone, raising the cost of competing for mindshare in small-group communication.
Third-order effects
- If secret internal incubation keeps producing launches, Google's product cadence increasingly decouples from the Android release calendar, with small teams shipping cross-platform experiments.
- The pattern points toward a portfolio approach to social: many quiet bets, few survivors, with whatever sticks eventually folded into a coherent Google social strategy that has remained elusive since at least 2007.
The trend: Consumer web giants are hedging their social ambitions by incubating small, secretive group-communication apps and shipping them across rival platforms rather than tying them to their own OS.