Google is well known for buying web companies and Google-fying them, and they have done it again. Their recent purchase of PostRank hints at their social media goals, reports PC Magazine.
PostRank (a play on Google’s own PageRank term) measures how many comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other social interactions a given piece of content generates, exactly the type of analytics a Web giant needs as it slowly grows its own social strategy.
So far, Google seems to be orienting itself around +1 icon and social search, as it slowly evolves a presence in social networking.
We know that making sense of social engagement data is important for online businesses, which is why we have worked hard to monitor where and when content generates meaningful interactions across the web,” PostRank’s Ilya Grigorik wrote in a blog post. “Indeed, conversations online are an important signal for advertisers, publishers, developers and consumers–but today’s tools only skim the surface of what we think is possible.
Photo by Robert Scoble