By Mathew Ingram on Gigaom, Sept. 14, 2011 – As reported in a number of places, Walmart has acquired OneRiot: a startup that originally tried to do social search before pivoting to focus on social advertising. OneRiot joins a unit called Walmart Labs, which the giant retailer created earlier this year with the acquisition of a company called Kosmix. Why should media companies (or anyone else, for that matter) find this interesting? Because what drove Walmart to make these acquisitions and create Walmart Labs is the same thing that plenty of other companies, and particularly media entities, should be interested in: making sense of all the data coming in from users on social networks and their sharing activity.
Making sense of the social-network firehose
As Rajaraman told me when I interviewed him at the Disrupt conference last year, where Tweetbeat was launched (a video clip from our interview is embedded below): “It was like we were waiting for this real-time data flow to come along so we could apply our semantic filter to it.” An understanding of how to filter those billions of tweets using semantic tools and a “taxonomy” or structured view of online data allowed Tweetbeat to generate customized views of the content being posted to Twitter in real time. In one of its first offerings, Tweetbeat let users follow not just information about the World Cup, but tweets and links about individual players, teams and countries.
Obviously, that kind of real-time filtering and analysis of activity can be applied to far more than just showing which soccer team is the most popular, and Walmart’s purchase of Kosmix showed Walmart is clearly interested in the potential of using these techniques to understand its customers and its market. The addition of OneRiot adds an advertising-related aspect to Walmart’s approach, which could help the retailer understand more about what drives users to click or interact with ads and ad-related content on social networks.