UPDATED 22:01 EDT / OCTOBER 17 2011

Livefyre Bags $4.5M for Real-Time Comment Streams

Reinventing the way people converse by means of real-time commenting is what Livefyre’s all about.  Through its platform, Livefyre builds a hyper-active community within your site that aims to increase traffic and engagement between you and your readers, tying it in with much of the activity that takes place across the social web.  The startup that recently launched SocialSync, its real-time conversation tool, has raised $4.5 million in a Series B round of funding.

Participating investors include Greycroft Partners, which led the investment, and other digital media financers like Cue Ball, HillsVen Group and ff Venture Capital.

Founder and CEO of Livefyre, Jordan Kretchmer, briefly explains how the organization was able to come up with SocialSync and its potential to become a powerful social networking tool:

“By working with the world’s leading publishers, we learned that they’re concerned with the same issue: tracking and connecting people who talk about their content in fragmented ways and external to their pages. SocialSync brings web conversations back to the content that inspired the conversation in the first place. We have an extraordinary roadmap of innovative features and are excited to partner with Greycroft to turn them into reality and further help publishers nurture and grow their communities.”

The tagging system that people enjoy on Facebook and Twitter is the easiest concept for SocialSync to tap.  True to its name, what it does is it allows you to sync and tag chosen Facebook and Twitter friends in a particular comment in a particular site, inviting them to a conversation and increasing on-site interaction and activity.  This updated version of Livefyre presents several features to scale up community participation.  These include Live and push-based interaction, Bi-directional social integration, Intelligent moderation & community and Powerful social applications.

With so much social content floating around, there’s a steadily growing market around automated curation and contextualization of this data.  With new analytics tools and new ways to tap into socially shared data, the contextualization aspect is key.  For Livefyre, it’s an important distinction to create a social media experience on a publisher site, placing the emphasis on connections instead of just content.

“In general there’s a lot of work being done in the curation space.  how do you curate different social media into content?  We’re about doing it automatically,” explains Kretchmer.  “There’s no input necessary–we’re automatically filtering through social media content that’s conversational.  We’re not just about aggregation and curation, which implies just content.  We want to make connections to other users.”

There’s no shortage of companies looking to find the best use for social data curation.  Eye-C is working on curating social streams for entertainment purposes, bridging media and device in real-time. And Eye-C’s technology is not only invading the social platform, it’s also targeting another billion dollar sector—the mobile industry.
Contributors: Cherr Aira

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