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.

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!

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

Thanks, adding to my rss stream

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

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.

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.

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