14 DAY TRIAL // Google, or rather YouTube, has now confirmed the acquisition of fflick, first rumored a couple of days ago. The video site has bought the small startup for the team and plans to build a broader social experience, especially outside of the site itself, with the help of the talented team behind fflick.
Fflick is a movie recommendation site which leverages Twitter sentiment and the opinions of users' own friends. Its sentiment analysis technology is used to determine the general view towards a particular flick on Twitter and generate a score based on that.
"We've always believed that 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 itself," Shiva Rajaraman, Group Product Manager at YouTube wrote.
"So today we're excited to announce we’ve acquired Fflick, a talented team that analyzes social media data to surface great content and the discussions around it," he announced.
While this is clearly a talent acquisition, it does seem like YouTube has bigger plans than just integrating the team. While YouTube is social at heart, it could do more to reach places outside the site itself and create a more social experience both on YouTube and in other places.
"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 surface the best of those conversations for you to participate in," he explained
YouTube revealed that there are over 400 tweets with a YouTube link every second. What's more, Facebook users watch 150 years worth of video each day on the social network.
While this drives engagement with the site, tapping into that and creating a better experience on YouTube, for example in things like YouTube Leanback which provides customized video recommendations, could prove useful.