Rebecca Burn-Callander of Management Today reports that Twitter has acquired Bluefin Labs for $70 million. She writes, “Twitter and TV, a match made in heaven. In fact, the social network has even released its own report entitled ‘Tune in with Twitter’, all about the burgeoning love affair between the small screen and its new ‘second screen’.  ‘The relationship between Twitter and television is strongly symbiotic,’ it says. ‘Users love talking about what is happening on TV, TV viewers love using Twitter to see other viewers‘ opinions.’ And you just have to look at the volumes of tweets generated by the Superbowl on Sunday, and the amount of 140-character dialogue dedicated to each new episode of The Undateables or Girls or My Mad Fat Diary to confirm the theory.”

She goes on, “Twitter knows that this is the medium that keeps its users tweeting and it is hoping to turn this mindless chatter into revenue. This is why it has snapped up Bluefin Labs, it’s most expensive acquisition to date by all accounts, which measures social media conversations about TV and claims to be able to quantify audience engagement in any given show or series. And this is no common or garden filter of the Twitter firehose. The semantic technology powering the Bluefin service was developed by brainiacs over at MIT.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Bluefin Labs