The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2011
PostRank's social-signal bet ends in Google's June 2011 acquisition
Waterloo's PostRank bet bookmarks, likes and comments would join links as the web's votes; Google bought it in June 2011.
PostRank
What the business is
PostRank aggregated reader activity from dozens of social hubs and turned bookmarks, likes, comments and shares into analytics, benchmarking and its own ranking of content.
How it started
PostRank came out of Waterloo, Ontario's startup scene as AideRSS, a name one commenter remembered hearing pitched at a WatStart meetup. The team aggregated reader activity from dozens of social hubs for analytics and benchmarking, and founder/CTO Ilya Grigorik described the idea as extending Google's link-vote PageRank with the rest of the social graph—bookmarks, likes, comments.
What happened
By 2011 PostRank was a Waterloo Ruby shop whose architecture ran on EventMachine, and its product had real users: one commenter said he had built a reputation and SEO engine on PostRank's social-signal data and called the product amazing. The team's public technical work—especially Grigorik's blog—had made it well known long before Google came calling.
How it ended up
On 2011-06-03 Google announced it had acquired PostRank. New signups were suspended while the team figured out what lay ahead, existing users were told the service would continue, and the Waterloo team headed to Mountain View to join Google.
Background
PostRank, born as AideRSS in Waterloo, Ontario, aggregated reader activity from dozens of social hubs and used it for analytics, benchmarking and ranking content. Its founder/CTO Ilya Grigorik framed the thesis in PageRank terms: if links are votes, PostRank extended that graph with the bookmarks, likes, comments and other gestures people make around content.
The company had built a following among developers and marketers before the exit. Commenters on the acquisition thread remembered hearing the pitch at Waterloo meetups, called PostRank a mostly-Ruby shop and the best example of EventMachine they had seen, and one said he had built a reputation and SEO engine on the product's social-signal data.
Google announced on 2011-06-03 that it had acquired PostRank. New signups were suspended while the team decided what lay ahead, existing users were told the service would continue as is, and the team moved from Waterloo to Mountain View—an outcome the local startup scene read as both a win and a loss for Canadian tech.
What has to be true
- Every bookmark, like and comment was content value that plain PageRank could not see, so an independent layer aggregating those gestures held data Google needed in its fight with Facebook.
- PostRank had years of head start in that niche and a technical team the community knew from open source, making a whole-team acquisition cheaper than rebuilding the capability.
- The thread itself proved the reach: 165 points and 54 comments within a day, with commenters able to describe the product, its architecture and its Waterloo roots from memory.
What can be applied
Own the signal the giants will need next: PostRank built the social-gesture layer before Google did, so the acquirer paid for the team and its graph instead of building either.
Aftermath
As of 2011-06-03 PostRank had just been acquired by Google: new signups were suspended, existing users were promised the service would continue, and the team was relocating to Mountain View. What happened to the PostRank service in later years is not documented in this batch's sources.
Sources
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