Well, this is going to make family dinners in the Zuckerberg house more than a little awkward. Google today announced that it had purchased Wildfire, a social media marketing company that counts Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Arielle, as one of its staffers.
Wildfire was founded back in 2008 when the owners of a New Zealand-based travel company decided to build their own app to handle marketing on Facebook fan pages. In four brief years, the company now has 16,000 clients using its service and around 400 staff, one of whom is Arielle Zuckerberg.
Arielle is the younger sister of Mark Zuckerberg and works at Wildfire as a junior product manager.
I’m not for a second suggesting that Google scooped up Wildfire just to annoy Mark Zuckerberg. No, Google is likely to use its Wildfire acquisition to improve its Analytics and Plus products. All I’m saying is that it’s likely to make Sunday dinner conversations particularly awkward when the subject of work comes around.
‘How’s work, Arielle?’
‘Well Mark we’re going okay, thanks for asking.’
‘Oh that’s good, I only ask because we have hundreds of millions of active daily users and I’m the youngest billionaire on the planet.’
‘How nice for you, Mark. You keep those billions of users and instead over at Google we’ll stay busy making millions of dollars rather than disappointing our shareholders, ok?’
‘Pass the peas?’
Image: Wildfire