Mountain View, California — Search behemoth Google is back on the prowl again, on Wednesday confirmed that it has scooped up “Fflick,” a company that mines Twitter messages to power a movie sentiment and recommendation engine for around $10 million, the companies confirmed this morning.
The terms of the acquisition was not revealed, is the latest evidence that the Mountain View, Calif., Internet search engine giant remains devoted to investing in emerging markets and technologies, including social media, mobile and display advertising.
“There are great conversations happening all the time off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich your experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube,” said Shiva Rajaraman, a Google product manager, in a post on a YouTube blog.
Fiddling around with fflick for a few minutes, it was easy to envision the product being integrated into Google’s social search offerings, and possibly its recently launched Hotpot, especially considering that movies were said to be only the first vertical used by fflick.
Comments on YouTube are not usually considered to be the most informative or intellectual, so perhaps Fflick can make sense of comments like “:02 BOOBIES!!!” and other unprintable observations. YouTube said Tuesday that it sees more than 400 tweets per minute that contain a YouTube link and over 150 years worth of YouTube videos are viewed on Facebook every day.
Fflick manipulates Twitter to propagate what movies the people you follow are recommending as well as what movies they have commented on positively or negatively. It also lets you browse a pre-set list of top-ranked movies, helping you decide what movies you may want to rent or go see at a movie theater.
The California-based fflick was established about six months ago by four former Digg employees. Google did not revealed the purchase price, which has been rumored to be about $10 million.
“We were fascinated by the technical talent, design instincts and entrepreneurial spirit of the Fflick team,” YouTube said in a blog post. “As part of YouTube, the Fflick team will help us build features to connect you with the great videos talked about all over the web, and unearth the best of those conversations for you to participate in.”
Now, Google has been talking about adding a social layer across many of its products, and this would seemingly fit that bill. With Fflick bundled in to YouTube, you can buy movie tickets, add certain films to your Netflix queue, and retweet anyone else’s tweets that you think are relevant to a particular film.
However, according to TechCrunch, the deal is expected to close later this week. An official Google spokeswoman refused to comment, saying, “We do not comment on speculation, as you know.”