14 DAY TRIAL // Google is said to be in the process of acquiring fflick a movie recommendation service based on your friends' tweets and the general view of Twitter users. Google is paying about $10 million for the company that's been around for only a few months. It's unclear whether Google is interested in the service, the sentiment analysis technology behind it or just the talent.
TechCrunch reports that Google is in talks to buy the company and the deal should close this week. There aren't any other details except the estimated price tag as Google's intentions are unclear.
fflick was launched in August, created by four former Digg employees. The service aims to provide movie recommendations for flicks currently in theaters or coming soon.
The idea is that there is a lot of useful information on Twitter, from your friends, people in the know or even average Twitter users, but it's hard to tap into it.
While you may notice a tweet from a friend at some point you're going to forget about it soon, there's no easy way to gathering all of the tweets to get an overall view.
You don't have to provide your Twitter account to use fflick, though the relevancy of the recommendations will suffer. fflick lists some of the movies in theaters now and shows the average Twitter sentiment around them.
This is based on the sentiment analysis technology fflick has developed which delivers a popularity rating based on tweets relating to the movie and what the users are saying about it. This sort of technology is not infallible, but it can provide an useful overview for movie watchers and studios alike.
In fact, that's how fflick intended to make money, at least partially, by selling aggregated data to movie studios ahead of launches and after them. Of course, now that Google is buying the company, there may be no need for a revenue stream any time soon.