Google + Double Click = Kittens?

Google announce their acquisition of doubleclick over 3 months ago. I having been wondering how long it would take for Google to actually start doing something with it.

This morning I logged in to my DFP (that’s “DART For Publishers”, or “DoubleClick Advertising, Reporting and Targetting For Publishers” – what a wonky acronym) account to put up some ads for work. I noticed two new things that I assume are are a sign that Google has started to take over DoubleClick’s tool development: 1) A new more friendly logo 2) a new menu item called “dfp dashboard beta.”

I love betas! So I open the dashboard. It looks fairly AJAX-ey, web 2.0-ish, vaguely reminiscent of the Google Analytics dashboard. The DFP dashboard (DFPD??) had a limited number of options, the only one that really seemed promising was the “widget catalogue.” The widget catalogue contains about half a dozen widgets related to the DFP product and two rather intriguing widgets. A sudoku widget – seems a little strange to have a game in a productivity tool. And something called “kitty” – a widget that displays pictures of cute cats.

Take a look at Kitty In Action[PIC].

Yup, that’s right folks, I knew this merger couldn’t be all evil. Apparently Google + DoubleClick = Kitty.

Only, I thought Google was a dog only employer.