Google has acquired SocialGrapple, a social graph analytics company founded by Andrey Petrov. Petrov issued a statement saying that SocialGrapple is being shut down as part of the acquisition. Google confirmed to Dain Binder that Petrov is joining Google, making this is a talent acquisition.

Here’s Petrov’s statement found on the SocialGrapple website:

I am excited to announce that the SocialGrapple team is joining Google.

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.

– Andrey

Social media analytics companies continue to be a hot acquisition targets. So far this year: Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com, WebTrends acquired Reinvigorate, Twitter acquired BackType, Google acquired PostRank, AVOS acquired Tap11 and Buddy Media acquired Spinback. Last year Lithium acquired Scout Labs.

Services Angle

One thing that most of these analytics companies have in common is that they are hosted services. Not only is the Twitter Firehose expensive to license, it also creates real big data problems in storage and analysis. It’s usually much more cost effective for companies to pay a third party that has access to the firehose for an analytics services than to deal with both the licensing costs and server architecture required for analyzing the stream of data coming from social services.