Yesterday, I woke to find that the rumors that had been flying over the weekend were true—my former employer Yahoo! was buying Tumblr. During the course of the day I’ve read a variety of articles debating the merits of the deal, commentary on the likelihood that Yahoo will in fact screw up Tumblr, and speculation about just how rich David Karp is going to be. As CEO of DataSift, this is an exciting and important event for the company and Marissa Mayer’s strategy, but the first take news and commentary on the announcement misses several important points about what is happening in social and in the market right now.

As a big data platform for social data, we’re always looking for new ways we can innovate to extend our platform to make it easier for companies to filter and receive social data from us. Today we’re proud to announce a new service available today to our customers: DataSift Carrier Pigeon Delivery.

As a Big Data platform for social, we’re continually working on how we can extend the value of insights that companies can derive from social data. Today we’re excited to announce our resyndication partnership with bitly (you can read the full announcement here) – bringing the social clickstream into our platform and integrating it to enable entirely new ways to analyze and act on social data insights.

Your social listening, engagement, marketing, and customer support initiatives – and beyond them, a range of emerging, social-infused business processes (that is, every process that involves people) – require clean, complete, well-structured, and reliable social data. If you’re already a DataSift customer, you surely agree, but if you’re not yet convinced, poke around the DataSift site a bit and I’m sure you will come around.

Last week, we attended the Social Media Strategies Summit in San Francisco, where Rob Bailey, our CEO, discussed the seven measurable actions that further your company’s marketing and social media efforts. In addition to providing a framework for moving your company’s efforts from beginner to pro, Rob highlighted companies who are thinking strategically about social media, such as Taco Bell, Burberry and KFC.