Some consolidation in the area of social influencer sites. PeopleBrowsr, owners of the social influencer analytics site Kred, is buying Swaylo, a specialist in measuring Facebook for influencer analytics and marketing campaigns. Swaylo, you may recall, was a business owned by startup Threadsy. The analytics service, called SwayloPro, was spun out as a separate company when Facebook acqui-hired Threadsy in August 2012. You may also recall that PeopleBrowsr is involved in a lawsuit with Twitter over use of its Firehose of data for analytics. Financial terms of the PeopleBrowsr/Swaylo deal were not disclosed.
The deal will give Kred more ammunition, and maybe more influence, to compete against others in the social influencer space, where companies like Klout and PeerIndex and also crowding for attention.
A blog post by Perer Ferioli, Kred’s “director of recognition,” notes that the combined companies will have some 500 million profiles on their books.
Significantly, the deal will give Kred its first entry into covering Facebook conversations and analytics as part of its overall measurement service. For its part, Kred has largely built out its business largely through Twitter — it took on the Firehose stream early on in its life — and it has also been building up that service to better compete with sites like Klout by adding in rewards for those who use the service to mention products. There will be a Kred for Facebook app now, which will be powered by Swaylo’s technology. It will also offer a Kred for Brands product that will let users measure and look at the influence of fans on their Facebook Pages.
Taken together, the companies say that PeopleBrowsr and Swaylo will have 400 terabytes of data in its Analytics Datamine, including over half a trillion conversations from Twitter and Facebook. That Twitter Firehose access gives the company data from 1,500 days of posts, and real-time access to some 10,000 posts per second, along with metadata collected from profiles, interests and connections.
But at the same time, it could be that Swaylo acquisition will help widen the data pool that PeopleBrowsr and Kred can use for its service — and that might come in handy if PeopleBrowsr loses or decides to drop the Twitter Firehose.
Late last year, PeopleBrowsr became embroiled in a lawsuit with Twitter over access to its Firehose: Twitter believes it’s no longer a strategic fit and wants to terminate their $1 million/year deal, with the company instead taking a portion of the data via Gnip or Datasift. Peoplebrowsr ultimately won a restraining order to continue to use it, although Twitter continues to “vigorously defend” itself. We are asking PeopleBrowsr about the latest status of that dispute. Update: “The case is still ongoing and PeopleBrowsr continues to have full access to the Twitter firehouse [sic] and it has no impact on the acquisition of Swaylo and the implementation of Swaylo data,” says Ferioli.
In the blog post announcing the Swaylo acquisition, Jodee Rich, CEO of PeopleBrowsr, describes social data as an “open” and “accessible” feature, perhaps in a hat-tip to the Twitter dispute.
“We believe that social data should be open, accessible and understandable by anyone who wishes to use it, whether they are marketers or individuals,” he said in a statement. “The acquisition of Swaylo and its technology reinforces Kred as the deepest, most transparent and most useful measure of influence and outreach for anyone that wants to find influential people on any subject.”
While Facebook’s Threadsy acquisition didn’t bring everyone on board, today’s news means that the remaining Swaylo team, including CEO Sabrina Riddle, will join PeopleBrowsr.
“The combination of PeopleBrowsr and Swaylo creates the strongest influence measure for marketers who want to identify, understand and activate everyday influential people within specific communities at scale across Facebook and Twitter and drive ROI for their business,” noted Riddle in a statement.