Twitter has acquired Mesagraph, a former LeCamping company, along with the UK-based SecondSync, in a bid to beef up their SocialTV offering, the company announced this week. The terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed; however, Mesagraph had already established itself as a dominant player in the Social TV space in France, working with Canal+, France Television & others. SecondSync, too, had a similar dominance of the UK market.
Twitter has become somewhat of the defacto second screen app for television, and with these acquisitions, alongside partnerships with major TV analytics firm Nielsen (among others), Twitter is looking to get ahead of Facebook on the Social TV front.
Twitter will, of course, still have to compete with Facebook for ad dollars – Twitter has been announcing a series of changes to Twitter in order to make it ‘more appealing’ to new users, and less complicated (explaining @ and # don’t ever get easier); however, Twitter’s fundamental ‘real-time’ interface creates a different relationship with users. While Facebook owns your social relationships, a relationship which people are willing to spend minutes or hours per day maintaining, Twitter only seems to own my access to data in real-time. News organizations have learned the hard way that being first can be great, but it rarely outweighs the value of quality in the long-run.
As Twitter continues to focus on their latest business, the Data of Now, their stock price will continue to reflect people’s confidence in the value of real-time.