Google acquires social analytics startup SocialGrapple

Google has acquired Twitter statistics startup SocialGrapple, a move suggesting the search titan is looking to boost its Google+ analytics tracking abilities.

Exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google launched Google+ a few months ago, and while the new social network has attracted a fair amount of headlines, it still has a long way to go to catch up to Facebook and Twitter in size. One way the company will help Google+ grow is by deepening its feature set and depth of third-party apps. Adding a premium analytics service that companies and brands can use to track and monitor accounts would certainly be a step in the right direction.

SocialGrapple was founded a year ago by Y-Combinator-bred Andrey Petrov with the goal of giving Twitter users interactive charts and better data representation of Twitter statistics. The service lets you compare different kinds of followers, see changes in your follower count, among other analytics.

Petrov writes on the SocialGrapple homepage about the acquisition:

SocialGrapple started a year ago, and launched only a couple of months later as a social graph analytics service. It was an amazing learning experience and I am incredibly grateful to all the users who supported this venture. Much of what was built over the months came directly from your needs and requests, so I feel like we were all on this journey together.

Since the first launch, we also explored keyword tracking and branched out to other social networks, but this was only scratching the surface. I’m looking forward to taking these ideas to the next level and revealing metrics on an incredibly larger scale.

Thank you again for being a part of my journey. I strive to continue building tools that make the world more transparent and empowered, and I can’t imagine a better partner than Google.

Do you think SocialGrapple could help Google improve Google+ account tracking?