Apple has acquired Topsy Labs, a search platform that indexes and helps users find trending tweets, for over $200 million.
Though confirming the deal, Apple has refused to elaborate on it. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," Apple spokesperson Kristin Huguet said in a statement.
Topsy is well-known among social media addicts, who use its service for searching the latest and trending tweets. The company has been indexing all the tweets - more than 400 billion - on Twitter since 2006, and as a preferred third-party service, it has direct access to Twitter's "firehose" of unstructured tweets.
The acquisition is part of Apple'a attempt in trying to integrate itself with existing social networks instead of trying to create one itself. Remember Ping, the music sharing service? Apple burnt its fingers badly with that one. And CEO Tim Cook knows better. "Apple needs to be social, but it doesn't have to own a social network," Cook said at the AllThingsD conference in June 2012. The company went on to integrate Microsoft's Bing into Siri and Facebook, Twitter and other social network services into its iOS and Mac OS X operating systems.
According to analysts, Topsy acquisition would help Apple integrate social analytics to its products and services and thereby, offer better user experience to customers. Topsy could be integrated with Apple's App Store, Siri, or even with the Safari web browser, the analysts said, adding that integration with Safari would give Apple the fillip in offering more personalized search results to Safari users. Something that Google and Bing have been doing for a long time.
Apple's shares were up 1.25 percent at $558.14 on the NASDAQ during early morning trading on Tuesday.
