Facebook announced an agreement to acquire SportStream, a San Francisco-based builder of sports conversation analysis technology. The company’s technology (which is apparently patent-pending) surfaces what it deems to be the highest quality Facebook posts and tweets, as well as Instagram media stats, news, etc. across all sports.

It offers partners an API to provide them with such data, and already counts the Seattle Seahawks, Michigan Athletics, Liverpool FC, Root Sports, Ask.com and Steph Curry among its partners. Facebook will look to offer the technology to its own partners.

“Through this acquisition, we expect to meaningfully improve the ability for all of our partners to access and utilize the insights from Facebook’s tools and APIs,” said Justin Osofsky, VP of Media Partnerships & Global Operations at Facebook. “SportStream’s demonstrated track record of surfacing interesting and engaging content, along with their deep understanding of our products, means that we will be able to build a better experience for the people who use Facebook, and for our partners who depend on us for real-time insights.”

“We’re excited to continue investing in helping people connect through their shared interests on Facebook,” he added. “The addition of this new team will enable us to work more closely with media partners as we continue to invest in more robust tools and APIs, as well as the technology partners who have integrated the Keyword Insights and Public Feed APIs into their product suite.”

The SportStream team will join Facebook at its Menlo Park campus.

In a message on its homepage, the SportStream team says:

We set out 18 months ago to help fans better connect around all the best moments in sports. We made it our mission to deliver them the best social content, stats, news and more around games, favorite teams and players in real-time. We’ve made significant progress, especially through our relationships with major sports media companies and teams. The tools and services developed by our small team have helped some of the biggest names in sports leverage social media in exciting new ways for their fans. Joining Facebook provides an amazing opportunity for us to greatly expand on our original vision.

Facebook sees the value in our technologies and team, and we’re excited to be a part of their continued investment in their platform. With this next step for SportStream, we’ll have greater resources to continue to do what we do best. We expect to make an impact on the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook as well as the many valued sports media businesses and professionals, teams, leagues and players that use Facebook to better connect with fans. At Facebook, we will continue delivering great experiences with our existing partners and actively work with them on transition planning. And we’ll be scaling and further developing tools and resources to help many, many more partners going forward.

SportStream has been backed by Vulcan Capital. Its existing products include SportsBase, a web app the SportStream iOS app.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: SportStream