News / All news / Twitter Acquires Social TV Tracker Trendrr

Twitter has acquired Trendrr, a social tracking TV service that until today competed with Twitter’s own in-house analytics products.

After this acquisition, the three dominant, stand-alone players in the social TV chatter space are gone. Twitter bought Bluefin Labs for a boatload of money earlier this year. Nielsen snapped up SocialGuide.

And now Twitter owns Trendrr, too, and will kill its analytics product after all of the company’s current contracts are up.

Why buy Trendrr? Well, for one, it keeps any future social TV analytics deals out of the hands of other social networks. Like, oh I don’t know, Facebook — which has made its social television ambitions crystal clear in recent months.

Just a few weeks ago, in fact, Facebook benefited from a paid Trendrr study stating that the mammoth social network had five times more TV chatter on its network than Twitter.

Another potential reason for the Twitter buy: Trendrr can also surface and discover particularly relevant tweets around certain events. That comes in the form of Curatorr, Trendrr’s Twitter-certified product, that lets partners like media companies and brands … well, curate a timeline of relevant tweets around a specific event.

As Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim said in a company blog post: Curatorr will «work with media companies, marketers, and display ecosystem partners to create compelling user experiences – continuing to pursue our initial charter of focusing on the real-time aspects of TV and media».

That’s especially helpful, we’d say, if a brand is trying to spin a certain narrative to audiences while watching an event in real time.

Not a bad way to kill two birds with one stone, either: Edge out the competition by snapping up the big analytics guys, while gaining some curation tools for media partner developers in the process.