Google acquires PostRank to help cut through the social media noise for users and advertisers. The move is Google’s latest play to challenge Facebook in social software.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) June 3 said it has purchased PostRank, a startup whose software sifts through social media to disambiguate signal from noise.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ReadWriteWeb, which uses PostRank, explained that users may plug in any RSS feed to PostRank, which scores each post in that feed by the number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. Users may then set up a filtered feed of the most-discussed items.
Publishers pay for PostRank’s data services and analytics to get a handle on not only where their content is being used and by whom, but what’s being said about their rivals. Companies such as Jive Software and Salesforce.com provide similar filtering services at a much more serious level for larger enterprises.
“Conversations online are an important signal for advertisers, publishers, developers and consumers—but today’s tools only skim the surface of what we think is possible,” wrote PostRank CEO Carol Leaman and CTO Ilya Grigorik in a blog post.