Many entrepreneurs dream of starting a social media company to have it get acquired by a giant company with deep pockets like Google one day. fflick introduced their movie-review-Twitter-scraping technology just last August and they have already been acquired by Google.
fflick’s technology mines data about movies from sites like Twitter and then carefully organizes the data and scores movies based on what Twitter users seem to love or hate. According to fflick CEO Kurt Wilms, fflick was just the beginning as there were plans to use the same technology for other verticals like TV shows, music, video games etc. That all changed last week when YouTube acquired fflick. No one is saying how much the four fflick founders (and former Digg employees) got but it must have been a pretty sweet offer to get them to cash-in on the burgeoning technology.
According to a YouTube blog post, the company plans to use the technology to help users connect “with the great videos talked about all over the web, and surface the best of those conversations.”
Don’t be surprised to also see YouTube’s video scoring algorithm get better. YouTube knows if they can serve up better videos more often they will get more views for longer periods of time and in the long run will be able to sell more advertising. fflicks “sentiment processor” can interpret a comment like “I want to see Inception so bad” as a positive comment and give it a positive score. In the YouTube universe, the same technology could be used to give a comment like “I like this video” a score of 3 on a scale of 1-5 while giving a comment like “this video is unbelievably Rewatchable” a score of 5.
For more about fflick and its founders check out the YouTube video below. (fflick discussion starts 17 minutes in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTmfC0Sz0c#t=17m22s)
Rewatchable – Video Production MA
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