SecondSync

» see secondsync.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Around 2011 a group in London set out to answer a question British broadcasters had suddenly started asking: when people watch television with a phone in their hand, what are they actually saying, and about which show? SecondSync built the measurement. It read the public conversation on Twitter against the broadcast schedule and turned the overlap into numbers a channel could put in front of an advertiser.

The homepage carried a live counter of tweets about UK television that day, with yesterday's top show beside a chart splitting the day's TV tweets by gender. That last one was the tell about who the real customer was. The shop window faced consumers and the business faced broadcasters and media agencies, who needed a number for something everybody could feel and nobody could count.

Twitter acquired SecondSync on 31 March 2014, the same day it acquired Mesagraph, which did the equivalent job in France for Canal+ and France Télévisions. Neither price was disclosed. Both teams moved into Twitter's London office, and Twitter's global business development lead framed the pair of deals as a commitment to social TV, a market the company was then trying very hard to own.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it measured ~

The useful thing SecondSync had was not the sentiment scoring that every social analytics company of that era advertised. It was the join. Matching an unstructured stream of posts to a broadcast schedule, across every channel, in a country with its own show titles and its own hashtag conventions, is tedious work that does not generalize, and whoever does it properly for a given country owns that country's data for as long as they keep doing it. That is also why Twitter wanted it. By 2014 the company had worked out that television was the only thing reliably producing simultaneous mass conversation on its platform, and it needed to be able to sell that to broadcasters in markets outside the United States. The farewell note says so openly: the point of joining was to take the work to markets outside the US.

~ the farewell page ~

The last thing secondsync.com ever served is worth reading. Under the heading "SecondSync Joins Twitter", a short post thanks the staff first, then Kantar Media for the investment, then the Technology Strategy Board for early grants, then SETsquared for business advice, then TechHub for the London base, and then Aardman Animations for an amazing and creative office space. A social TV measurement company sharing a building in Bristol with the people who make Wallace and Gromit is a detail no press release would have told you.

The same post contains the only published statement about what happened to the service: "Our current UK product will continue to be available for an interim period." No date was attached to that, and none was ever published. The Internet Archive caught the page intact on 23 April 2014. By 5 May the domain was redirecting, and it never served a page again.

~ the second screen ~

Watching television with a phone going at the same time was never a British invention and never needed measuring to exist. It happened everywhere there was a shared broadcast and a cheap data plan, which by 2011 included Turkey, where the live commentary during a match or a reality final was its own parallel broadcast. What was specific to the UK was the apparatus built on top: the ratings-style league table, the agency briefings, the idea that an ad break could be priced against a tweet count.

That apparatus is mostly gone now, while the behavior carried on. Twitter's public firehose narrowed over the following years, and the measurement business it bought SecondSync to build never turned into the product line those 2014 announcements described.

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