Clearspring, the social-sharing company — in an effort to increase its business as a marketing analytics player — has acquired XGraph, a data science company.

Clearspring declined to provide the price it paid for XGraph, but said the deal was in cash and stock. The start-up raised $3.75 million just over a year ago.

The combined company has 85 employees — 70 at Clearspring and 15 at XGraph.

Execs at the the McLean, Va.-based company said the purchase will increase value to advertisers and publishers via audience targeting and data science. Clearspring is best known by consumers for its AddThis social-sharing tool, which provides a lot of detailed user data.

Clearspring raised $20 million in funding in May. At the time, the company said it planned to spend its new cash on acquisitions that leveraged data and built audiences more efficiently.

The New York-based XGraph focuses on modeling and monetizing the Web’s social graph.

“We get a lot of data points every day and making sense of them is something we have already been doing, but XGraph fits the bill to go even further in the multi-graph use of data,” said Clearspring CEO Ramsey McGrory. “It puts us in a position to be the market leader for the application of data.”

Key Compton, CEO and co-founder of the three-year-old XGraph, noted that the industry has become data-driven in new ways.

“People are connected to each other via social connections in a multi-graph platform,” said Compton. “I think there are some really interesting opportunities to access the data.”

Here’s the official press release for the deal:

Clearspring Acquires XGraph to Create Largest Multi-Graph on the Open Web

Company accelerates growth by deepening data team and technology

McLean, VA and New York. NY. — November 1, 2011 – Clearspring, provider of the largest social sharing and analytics platform, AddThis, announced today it has acquired XGraph, Inc., a leading data science company focused on modeling and monetizing the web-wide social graph. Clearspring’s massive reach and proprietary real-time data processing capability, coupled with XGraph’s audience technology, create the largest multi-graph platform on the web — mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The investment in XGraph’s data science capabilities marks another step on Clearspring’s rapid growth trajectory. XGraph’s team has deep data science expertise with applied backgrounds in advertising, sociology, mathematics and computer science. Their unique technology dynamically organizes users by shared connections and interests. XGraph’s team and platform will drive Clearspring’s existing efforts with publishers, advertisers and agencies forward while also setting the stage for new innovation.

“Clearspring is at the epicenter of two major shifts online — the web becoming social and personal, and advertising becoming data-driven and accountable. The common thread in both changes is data. To compete in this new world, companies will not only need the ability to access and process big data, but also have the ability to activate that data to create value for consumers, publishers and advertisers,” said Ramsey McGrory, Clearspring’s new Chief Executive. “The combined company has the people, technology and data to enable our clients to stay at the forefront of these changes. 2012 will be a breakout year for Clearspring.”

For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, Clearspring will immediately be able to provide the largest multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the open web. By using this technology to identify a brand’s core audiences and finding millions of other connected and like-minded people online, the company can now drive more efficient spending and increased campaign performance. Clearspring also plans to leverage this new capability to deliver publishers unique audience insights, monetization capabilities and actionable data products in the coming year.

“Most companies only capture one dimension of how we’re all connected, whether it be our friends or people we share with — a single graph approach. XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as brand affiliations, intent and more — a multi-graph approach,” said Key Compton, XGraph’s CEO. “We’re truly excited to leverage our technology to unlock the value of Clearspring’s massive data set and help publishers and advertisers truly harness the power of the web-wide interest graph.”

XGraph is headquartered in New York with an office in Silicon Valley. All XGraph employees based in New York will join Clearspring’s office there. Clearspring plans to keep the office in Silicon Valley. The combined company will have 85 employees nationwide.

Though the measurement techniques for these kinds of syndicated Web tools are in flux, the McLean, Va.-based Clearspring has more than one billion monthly unique visitors, which it says beats competitors such as ShareThis and Meebo.

Clearspring co-founder and CEO Hooman Radfar said his company opened this year with its first profitable quarter, and that it will bring in tens of millions in revenue annually, “tripling this year and accelerating.” Radfar attested that he doesn’t need the new funding to operate, but rather plans to spend it on acquisitions.

What does he want to buy? Start-ups that “leverage data and build audiences more efficiently,” Radfar said. “We’re trying to look at companies that are younger and earlier than us but don’t have millions to build the real-time infrastructure we’ve built.”

Radfar said that beyond its current advertising business, Clearspring is poised to take advantage of all the data about users and content that passes through its system. “Data is the most valuable outcome of the social web,” he said.

Interestingly, Radfar observed that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s new company AVOS, which bought Delicious and a social media marketing company, sounds like it’s heading down a similar path of analyzing real-time audience data.

ShareThis, one of the largest online widget providers, recently doubled its conversion rates by implementing OAuth, the open standard for authorizing access to a user’s Web accounts.

With OAuth, readers can share a page directly from a ShareThis publisher’s site, rather than leaving the page to go log into a social network. They can also share to more than one service simultaneously. Then, their log-in information and preferences can be easily accessed on new sites that also use ShareThis with OAuth.

In tests with about 10 percent of ShareThis users, users that clicked on a “share” button and then actually shared that content grew to 16.4 percent versus 8.5 percent where users had to type in their credentials.

ShareThis is now extending OAuth as an option to all its publishers. The company predicts that due to network effects across its one million participating sites, conversion numbers may increase again.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto, Calif.-based ShareThis shared some other stats with us.

ComScore ranked ShareThis its No. 1 U.S. widget or application provider in March, with 172 million unique visitors. That beat out rival Clearspring, which had 159 million uniques.

In addition, ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel said his company’s revenue is growing 100 percent each quarter and his team is growing rapidly: the ShareThis staff grew to 50 from 35 in just the last two months. A couple of recent snags are chief scientist Yan Qu from AOL and chief architect of advertising systems Prasanta Behera from Yahoo.

It’s not all rah-rah-sis-boom-bah for ShareThis over here; NetworkEffect also plans to check in with Clearspring for an update this week.

Steve Case is most famous for building America Online, which became the Internet’s first mega-company, and for merging it with Time Warner (TWX), which became the worst corporate marriage in recent history.

But AOL (AOL) is 25 years old, and the AOL-Time Warner deal is a decade old. What has Steve Case been doing since then?

Investing, in a lot of different stuff. His Revolution holding company has stakes in everything from Revolution Health, a wellness/fitness/medical advice Web site, to Cacique, a Costa Rican resort, to Clearspring, a Web widget company. Late last year, Case sold Revolution Money to American Express (AXP) for $300 million. And Zipcar, another portfolio company, has just filed for a $75 million IPO.

Liveblog

“We meet again,” sighs Kara. “I just can’t quit you.” “We’re off to a good start,” says Steve.

1:58 pm: Kara–Let’s go back 25 years. Talk about the beginning of AOL.

1:59 pm: Case–Well, Zuckerberg was one year old.

I got into this when I was in college, reading Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave.” It was riveting.

We started in 1985, in partnership with Commodore. It was a total bet on community. We believed the killer app was community. Chat rooms, bulletin boards, etc.

On the road show, no one believed us. Which was fair, because we didn’t have many customers seven, eight years into it. Needed lots of technology to catch up a bit. And needed people to catch up, too.

2:01 pm: Kara–What put you over the top? All of those discs?

2:02 pm: Case–It wasn’t the discs. It was the content. By 1992, ’93, many more people had computers in their homes, connectivity was better. The Internet was evolving–it wasn’t legal for us to connect to the Internet until 1991.

It took a while before we were considered an Internet company. Even when we went public, we were an interactive company, or online services. Had to morph as market evolved.

2:04 pm: And at some point News Corp. (NWS) sued you?

2:04 pm: Yeah, in 1998. they were upset about an online game they thought we were excluding. There was a lot of antitrust chatter then. Those were the good old days.

Kara: Well, you proved them wrong, the idea that you were too powerful.

Case: “I’m not going to comment on that.”

2:05 pm: On the Time Warner deal: Made sense for us and our shareholders at the time. It made strategic sense. But as Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is hallucination.

I’m recalling, by the way, that one of our strategies was to buy Apple (AAPL), hire Steve Jobs and put him in charge. It was an idea that was floated.

Big point is that with the right leadership, which my group, including me, couldn’t provide, we were set up to succeed. Look at stuff like iTunes, YouTube, etc.–all of that could have come from that company.

2:07 pm: I stepped down after the merger. After a couple of years, I started making one-off investments. Then created Revolution as a holding company. Runs through portfolio, which you can see on his site.

2:09 pm: Kara–You were early on a lot of important trends. Oh, and tell me about your favorite device that isn’t the iPad (thanks, Kara!).

2:10 pm: I’m interested in the social media side, and there’s some stuff bubbling there that reminds me of the early days. Also, mobile and location-based stuff, really. But really, how the Internet can be a platform to change the world. Even companies like Zipcar and our resorts properties only work because of the Internet.

Kara: What’s the relevance of the Internet to a company that helps rich people travel?

Case: Booking tickets on the Web [hmm]. Health care is the one that can really benefit from the Web. Runs through Revolution Health portfolio.

2:13 pm: Case–Turns out I’m much more interested in businesses that touch consumers. Like Steve Jobs said, I like that better than enterprise.

And health care is really a wellness push. Because health care as we define it is really sick care.

2:14 pm: Kara–Talk about Twitter and Sarah Silverman.

Case starts to answer, but Kara interrupts and steers him somewhere else.

Case: I really didn’t want to do a blog in the last 10 years, because that seemed like work. But Twitter made sense. I signed up early, like three years ago, but like a lot of people, it didn’t make sense to me. About a year and a half ago it made sense. Less about what you’re doing than what you’re interested in.

2:15 pm: I’ve always liked that interaction part. I wish we’d thought of Twitter–we were headed in that direction with buddy lists, etc.

2:16 pm: Kara–Tease out the different big Web businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare.

Case: Facebook’s obviously a real company with real revenue. Twitter and Foursquare are much earlier, but they could be on the cusp of a real business with real revenue.

Kara: If you were a 19-year-old college student, what would you be looking at?

Case: I’m hoping that the Internet just becomes everyday life. You don’t call it email, it’s just mail. Etc.

2:18 pm: Big opportunity for Web integration in health: Wi-Fi pedometers, Internet-connected scales, etc. In most cases, remote diagnostics would be able to help you solve and correct problems.

And I think letting people know about healthier choices can solve a lot of problems, and the Web can help with that.

2:19 pm: Kara–Make some predictions. You’re a visionary!

On Yahoo (YHOO): Case pauses. “I don’t know.” This industry changes a lot. I don’t feel like I’m in a good place to make a judgment. Do remember that iconic brands, with large audiences: You should never give up for dead. Remember what happened to Apple.

On AOL: Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

On Apple: Nobody would have imagined this 13 years ago, when Steve came back. Remember that it was worth $1 billion and left for dead. By the way, I’ve told Steve this–I’d love to see Apple focus on health care.

2:22 pm: On Facebook, social networking: Really big. Not going away. That kind of communicating is fundamental to human behavior.

On Hollywood: I do think it’s puzzling. We had a hard time getting VC money into the Internet, but Time Warner would spend $1 billion a year betting on movies. They were very comfortable with that, and so many fail.

2:24 pm: Kara–How do you want to be remembered?

Case: “That sounds kind of like a gravestone question.”

Kara: “Okay.”

Case: I want to be remembered, and my team to be remembered, as mostly a force for good, able to get tens of millions of people to take the Internet seriously and integrate it into their everyday lives. We helped get America online.

2:26 pm: A question from analyst Mary Meeker: Please remind us of the market value of AOL when you went public. And please talk about challenges you had when you were growing (“America offline,” etc.)

Case: We raised $10 million or $15 million, had about $30 million in revenue and were valued at $70 million.

As to the challenges–all of them were double-edged swords. For instance, regarding downtime, it took a better part of a decade to get people to take us seriously, and we let them down. Then again, the fact that people cared about our service problems made it clear that they took what we offered them seriously. It took us a year or so to work through that.

2:29 pm: We had a lot of ups and down. Mostly downs. It was a decade of building. One of my worries now, is that there are so many companies that are built to flip. I wish people took a longer view, and I wish VCs did as well.

2:30 pm: Case: I went to school in Hawaii with Obama.

Kara: How was he?

Case: I don’t know. I was a senior and he was a freshman.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Starting Thursday, however, there will be a new online service that aims to change all that. The service, called SnagFilms, allows anyone with a blog, a Web site, or even a page on a social-networking site, to open a virtual movie theater and show these documentaries, free. The virtual theater is a small widget that contains the film, and that can be embedded easily and quickly in a wide variety of popular social-networking services and blog platforms. No technical knowledge is needed.

Once a site or page owner “snags” a film in this way, visitors to the site can view it in a larger window that pops out from the widget. This window plays the film, displays some ads and provides links to charities or organizations related to the topic of the movie. The films can even be played in full-screen mode. Many also include links for buying a DVD of the film. All that’s missing is the popcorn.

These aren’t homemade, three-minute YouTube (GOOG) clips. Nearly all are feature-length, professionally produced documentaries, from both small independent filmmakers and well-known sources such as PBS and National Geographic.

The owner of the site or blog gets no direct revenue from posting the films. He or she is, in effect, donating space to support the film or the cause it highlights, a decision SnagFilms calls “filmanthropy.” But the filmmaker and SnagFilms do make money — splitting advertising revenue equally. And the charity or organization can make money, too, if viewers opt to donate. The filmmaker also can make money from DVD sales, paying SnagFilms an 8.5% commission.

I have been testing a prerelease version of the SnagFilms service and have posted SnagFilms widgets with no problems to Facebook, MySpace (News Corp), iGoogle, Netvibes, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces (MSFT) and Vox. Many more Web sites can house these widgets, including the vast number of blogs built on the popular WordPress and TypePad platforms.

Here’s how it works. You just go to the SnagFilms Web site at www.snagfilms.com, select one or more of the 250 or so films available at launch and click the snag button. A menu pops up that lists numerous popular networking services and platforms. Clicking one will automatically post the SnagFilms widget of your choice on your page or site at one of these services. You can also simply view the films at the SnagFilms site.

Each widget includes an “info” button that takes you to a page on the SnagFilms site giving the details and background on the film. You can also leave comments here, rate the film, order the DVD and see recommendations for related films.

The system is viral, so you don’t have to start at the SnagFilms site. A Web surfer who sees a SnagFilms movie anywhere on the Web can spread it around just by clicking the snag button on every widget. The snag button allows the viewer to either host the film or to email a link to the film that will bring friends to the SnagFilms site to view or snag it.

SnagFilms is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, a former top executive at America Online (TWS), who in recent years has become a documentary-film producer. He became frustrated with the distribution bottleneck for such films and arranged to take over AOL’s documentary site, TrueStories, and turn it into SnagFilms. He also is chairman of the board of a company, Clearspring, which created the film widgets.

At launch, the SnagFilms catalog includes well-known documentaries like “Super Size Me,” but also lesser-known films on a wide variety of topics, including college football, AIDS in Africa, politics, profiles of average people and tales of the New York Fire Department. One of my favorites was “Paper Clips,” the story of how a school in Tennessee learned about the Holocaust.

Filmmakers can submit movies to the site by sending an email to: submissions@snagfilms.com. SnagFilms says it doesn’t censor or edit the films, but won’t accept pornography or films deemed to encourage hate. It does have a selection process, so not all films submitted will make it onto the site. The company hopes to add more films soon.

I had only two gripes about SnagFilms. First, the films should be able to play inside the widget itself, with an option inside to play at larger sizes. Having to open a separate browser window is a pain. The company says it’s working on this.

Second, the initial catalog is light on documentaries from a conservative or probusiness perspective. But the company says it is “actively seeking to offer differing viewpoints” and will soon add “a number of films that are quite conservative in philosophy.”

SnagFilms is a great idea for getting documentary films in front of more people. It’s another example of how the Web is changing media distribution for the better.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.