The tech world continues to have an interest in understanding and controlling social analytics. After Apple purchased Topsy Labs last year in order to better gauge its analytics online, Twitter is following suit with the acquisition of data partner Gnip. The move is seen as evidence that the company is looking to have a better system in place to analyze the tweets that are being published.
Although financial terms of the deal were not provided, many believe it to be in the ballpark with Apple's buying of Topsy at around $200 million. That's a hefty amount, but for companies looking to advance marketing efforts and deliver up-to-date information as topics become viral and spread across the globe, analytics companies are key to developing and maintaining databases that offer solutions to online issues.
In essence, Twitter wants to know more about the roughly 500 million tweets generated daily faster.
Only a small number of analytics companies have been granted complete access to every tweet since the company's inception in 2006, and Gnip is one of those. This means that the purchase of the company should not need to be rocky, as the two companies have long worked together.
However, instead of Twitter purchasing the information Gnip had been providing, it will be part of the same company, making quicker decisions based on more up-to-date information being understood.
The move will see Twitter be able to expand Gnip's current data onto its own data platform, enabling the now subsidiary to deliver continued analytic research on the Internet to its fast-growing customer base of companies.
"...we have agreed to acquire Gnip, a leading provider of social data and a long-standing Twitter data partner. Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners. Together we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter," the company stated.
The acquisition seems to be a natural progression for both countries, with Gnip saying that it was the first authorized reseller of tweets and the first company to deliver archives of tweets on topics and hashtags to private customers.
The overall goal of companies like Twitter, Apple and others is to be able to better cope with the quick changing online landscape, where hashtags can go viral at an instance and disappear just as fast. Rapidly understanding what users are searching for and what they are clicking on can help companies pinpoint where to market products and ideas.
