San Francisco Social Media Pioneers Buy Social Media Analytics Firm

YouTube is almost synonymous with social media on some levels, and now its founders have purchased a company that makes software to help businesses keep tabs on what’s being said about them – on two other defining names in social media, Facebook and Twitter.

The founders’ new social media analytics firm, Avos, is adding two new sites to its enterprise: the Facebook and Twitter “intelligence and engagement platform” Tap11.com, and the social bookmarking service Delicious (which YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen acquired from Yahoo Inc).

Hurley says the goal of these acquisitions is to, “Create the world’s best platform for users to save, share, and discover new content. With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyze their links’ impact in real-time.”

The venture is not the pair’s first brush with acquisitions. Hurley and Chen sold YouTube to Google Inc. for $1.76 billion in 2006, roughly one year after the website was launched. Today, it’s a household name that two San Francisco social media dabblers founded the user-generated video sharing destination and its first video, titled “Me at the Zoo,” was uploaded to the site.

Terms of the most recent deal were not disclosed; but in the opinion of their contemporaries in the field, Hurley and Chen have managed to transform themselves into San Francisco social media legends. Some experts have speculated that Delicious, in particular, may indeed solve the elusive “information discovery problem” many of us never knew existed.