Google acquires Postrank.com | Hacker News Reader

Google acquires Postrank.com

blog.postrank.com

165 pointszmoazeni54 comments

This is the first time I've ever heard of Postrank. Can someone provide a brief of what they do and why google would buy them?

They look at your social media posts and provide analytics that measure how engaged people are (commenting, liking, retweeting, etc).

It seems like this functionality may ultimately be included in Google analytics.

This is why press releases usually include boilerplate describing each company.

One of the reasons could be its founder/CTO, Ilya Grigorik. Check out http://www.igvita.com/. He is brilliant.

Ilya is amazing. I wonder if this means that some Ruby will be creeping into the Google ecosystem.

Congrats to Ilya. His personal blog has some of the most inpiring articles in Ruby/AI and technichal stuff in general: http://www.igvita.com

Thanks guys! Rest assured, I have no plans on retiring from keeping the blog going -- it's what got me here in the first place!

Congrats to the PostRank team - but I selfishly hope that Google's famous secrecy won't stop Ilya from blogging and releasing awesome open-source code!

Thanks, adding to my rss stream

Absolutely. As a beginning Rubyist, I've learned a lot from Ilya's posts. Congrats to Ilya and the whole PostRank team!

An old but descriptive article about them in Financial Post : http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1554656

I used PostRank when I built a reputation & SEO engine. Their product is amazing. It extracts all social signals it can find in the web. My guess is that Google, trying to scrape all social signals they could, decided to hire those guys to help them. One more weapon in their fight with Facebook.

In a nutshell: we aggregate user activity from dozens of social hubs, and use that data for analytics, benchmarking and so forth. So, if you think of links as "votes" as the core-data for Google's PageRank.. Than at PostRank we're extending that graph with dozens of other gestures: bookmarks, likes, comments, etc, and building our ranking on top of that! I'm sure you can imagine the myriad of ways of how that data can be applied in different contexts.

Super excited to join Google and take it to the next level!

Congrats!

Please don't stop blogging your technical deep dives! Your passion is an inspiration.

Give me a shout when your down in the SF bay area :)

Congrats Ilya! You'll be missed in Waterloo.

I don't use PostRank but I read all of Ilya's articles. His articles are awesome. He is awesome. Congratulations. You deserve a pay day.

Wow, congratulations PostRank! I remember hearing your pitch at one of the WatStart meetings when I lived in Waterloo, back when you were AideRSS.

This is also seems like a smart move by Google. They want to "get more into social" (whatever that means), and PostRank has been aggregating and analyzing social interactions across the web for longer than most.

Not to mention they have a solid team. Lots o' technical chops there. Interestingly enough, they're mostly a Ruby shop if I'm not mistaken.

We are indeed!

Will it be now, you will be rewriting everything in Python or Go? :P

Congrats to the team!

I just hope this doesn't reduce the volume or quality of posts to igvita.com - it's such an amazing resource for technical ruby "stuff".

I also remember this, I think it was barcamp. Great to see Waterloo successes!

Wow!! This is amazing!

Huge congratulations to Ilya and the crew at PostRank. Consistent and best-in-class execution. Awesome job and hope it was a huge pay day :)

I know it's hypocritical for me to say but rather unfortunate they're moving to MV. Would be nice to have some rich young people in Waterloo to act as investor/mentors.

It's especially unfortunate since there is a Google office in Waterloo. I know it's probably pretty complicated, but I feel like this isn't really a benefit to the Canadian startup ecosystem.

Thanks Omar! Definitely couldn't have done it without all the support from the local community and friends - Waterloo is an awesome place.

Who`s going to host our hackathons now?

Also, congrats!

Agreed. I'm surprised they're all moving to MV when there's a Google office just down King street. I hope they don't forget their Waterloo roots when they're all rich in Silicon Valley.

Congrats! Keep pushing for Waterloo interns hiring ;-)

Congratulations Ilya. I first saw postrank (aiderss) at an Amazon AWS meetup years ago and grabbing a beer with you guys. Google's a great company of super smart people and you guys will fit right in.

And please continue blogging!

Great to see a company out of Waterloo get some well-deserved recognition. Definitely agree that it's sad to see them all get moved to MV, but such is life. We still have Kik and RIM though :)

Kudos to them!

Well deserved. Postrank has been the best example of usage of EventMachine.

Is this the same guy who made vimgolf? And is it in any way related to http://www.vimgolf.com being down right now?

lol! No, apparently vimgolf just hit the limit on the free mongohq account. Upgraded - back to normal. Enjoy the golfing! ;D

It was only a matter of time before Google started using Cassandra... :)

(Re http://webpulp.tv/post/4184040219/scaling-postrank-using-rub...)

I hope their first job will not be to rewrite it all in C++ or Java on top of some proprietary Google storage. :)

Hopefully they will be rewriting in Go ;)

Interestingly many rubyists seem to be joining the Go community lately.

What will this mean for the users of the service? Will it be shut down in the future?

Google acquisitions are generally shut down and aspects of the company's features start showing up in related products

We've suspended new signups for the moment, while we figure out what lies ahead. Having said that, for all existing users, the service will continue as is! Stay tuned for more.

So you sign an acquisition deal without discussing what "lies ahead"? I guess a "We can't give much details for now, ..." would be sufficient.

There is something reasonably similar to PostRank in PHP: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/want_to_do_something_similar_to_po...

Nice to see another Canadian Company get acquired!

Go Canucks Go!

Really? It's nice to see our best engineers moving down to California?

Meh. Maybe Canadian companies should do a better job at retaining talent. I love my country (Canada) but so few startups and creative agencies are appealing. That's not to say they don't exist but there's just so much more opportunity and money down south.

If you don't find startups and creative agencies to be appealing, why not start your own rather than complain about it?

I did. I moved to the U.S. and started my own.

Suffice it to say you don't really love your country, you just like the idea of it/

Yes, It's always nice to see great people given opportunities that they want.

It is bittersweet, it's a big win and lose for Canadian tech, but imo a net win. Canadian investors and other Canadian tech companies should see this as a sign that Canada is serious about building great world class technology. Without exits like this, outsiders will continue to assume that "there is no tech scene in Canada", which is untrue.

If this buyout motivates more local engineers to start companies, I think it is a good thing.

Anyone have a API key from Postrank they don't use and wouldn't mind parting with? Really need something like this.

Shouldn't the headline be "Entire Postrank team quits and is hired by Google"?

You're assuming that it's a talent acquisition, while I think their product is a great cultural match for google, which had always been about data. Guess, time will show.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com