After Facebook has snapped up the mobile-driven photo app Instagram, followed by a San Francisco-based startup ‘TagTile’, social media experts are speculating over the next target that might be on the radar of tech giants – as part of their multi-million buyout lists. Here’s a quick review of popular second-rung social services that are probably up for grabs:

Spotify

Its USP: Universal jukebox’ social music service for songs on the go

Who might be interested in it?: Facebook, Google

Features of the service

• Music is among the big things in social arena. Spotify is a social music collection of millions of tracks in the social realm, available for your desktop PC, Mac, audio system at home and mobile phone for music on the go. And because the music plays live, there’s no need to wait for downloads and no big dent in your hard drive.
• Music gets social with the service that makes it even easier to both discover and share your favorite music friends. With Spotify and Facebook, users can see and tune to what their friends are hearing at the moment. You just hit ‘play’ button on any music post, and get started.  Users can share music just with a flick of the fingers, and send it to their friends, or post tracks on other social networks.
• Spotify already is in a tie-up with Facebook, to help it grow fast in the US ahead of other music services. The problem perhaps is that per-track payments can cap profitability. However, tying music lovers into a service exclusively tied into your network is a perfect way of knitting them into your social world.

Pinterest

Its USP: Dynamic picture & thoughts ‘pinboard’ social service

Who might be interested in it?: Google, Facebook

Features of the service

• Having well established itself as a niche player in the social media landscape, the service is most likely to dominate it over time owing to its unique user-friendly attributes.
• It’s attracting major attention globally. More and more people are spending time on it since it’s highly social in nature. This innovative social platform calls itself an online pinboard for compiling, organizing and sharing your personal and professional interests.

Tumblr

Its USP: Simple blogging service with which you can well customize every aspect, from your theme’s HTML, to colors.

Who might be interested in it?: Google

Features of the service

• It allows you to share anything – right from post text, quotes, photos to links, music and videos – that too from your browser, email, phone, desktop, or wherever you currently are.
• After Twitter acquired Posterous, its rival simple blogging service, the presumably more expensive and larger Tumblr looks quite ripe for acquisition. Google can monetize it with adverts while catching all users on it; or even pull them all into Google+.

Thisismyjam

With this social music sharing platform, your friends get to pick the music – a track every day. It is presently integrated with Twitter and Facebook.

Who might be interested in it?: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple

Features of the service

The takeover premise is on the basis quite similar to that of Spotify – music is the next most popular social network, a way to bind people into your current network. And if you can sell it too, you get some added revenue, is logic of the more dominant players.