As Google continues to buy up companies left and right, the next startup in their very valuable M & A crosshairs is a social movie rating site called fflick. The idea behind fflick is a social rating site that is geared specifically to movies. There are many other social media tools that have this function, like Facebook, but fflick tries to deliver the experience specifically through Twitter. It harnesses the Twitter activity about any given movie and aggregates the data into a social graph of sorts to rate movies. Ratings can be viewed as an overall Twitter-verse judgement of a movie, or you can filter tweet ratings by your friends only. It’s an interesting idea, and one that Google obviously approves of.
TechCrunch reports that Google is looking to pay $10 million for the company, which aims to generate revenue by selling the Twitter data, a good real-time estimate of movie buzz, to studios for marketing purposes. It’s unclear why Google has this company specifically in mind, as it certainly isn’t the first company to use Twitter data to measure interest in social objects, but keep in mind that the company was founded by a few ex-Digg employees. Many times, an acquisition will take place just to get a hold of talent in the employee pool.
Either way, this is yet another sign that Google plans on making Twitter as much of an integral part of their search service as Microsoft is doing with their Bing/Facebook integration. Ever since they enabled Twitter results in their real time search functionality, Google seems to have made it a mission to make Twitter central to the Google search experience.
Image credit: TechCrunch
15 Comments - Add comment