Twitter put out a blog post on Tuesday confirming what was reported on Monday — that the company has officially acquired Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company, and will be folding the group into Twitter as part of the company’s partnership with Nielsen to understand how social activity interacts with TV.
Social media has grown to change how we experience live events, particularly those broadcast on television, and it’s understandable that Twitter would want to understand exactly how people are engaging with that content on its platform.
Twitter wrote that it thinks “Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help us create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences,” and builds on their work with Nielsen to come up with a Twitter TV rating system. The company wrote that it would honor existing Bluefin customer contracts but would not be establishing new ones:
“We plan to collaborate closely with Nielsen and SocialGuide on product development and research to help brands, agencies, and networks fully understand the combined value of Twitter and TV.”
The Cambridge-based Bluefin Labs wrote in a blog post that it was joining up with Twitter, and explained how Bluefin would fit into the company:
We’ve had an incredible time pioneering the field of social TV analytics over the last few years. Bluefin Labs started out as an academic pursuit in cross-modal machine learning that Mike andDeb brought out of the MIT Media Lab. With the close mentorship of Frank Moss and Brian Bedol, we grew that research effort into the world’s first industry-grade analytics platform to link social media commentary with TV shows and commercials at scale.
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