Twitter announced Tuesday that it has acquired social data provider Gnip to better deliver aggregated data that can help various businesses find trends, breaking news, connect with customers and more.
Twitter, the popular micro blogging site, said it acquired social data provider Gnip in order to solely take up the role of packaging and selling data, which is an area of expertise for the Colorado-based startup. The social networking site already worked closely with Gnip to gather insight on user-generated data for several years. The acquisition will help Twitter connect better with academic institutions, journalists, marketers, and many others by delivering aggregated data to spot trends and breaking news, VP of Twitter's Global Business Development & Platform, Jana Messerschmidt said in a blog post, Tuesday.
Gnip's long-standing partnership with Twitter played a significant role in handling massive amounts of data handled by the company on a daily basis. The social data provider was one of Twitter's many Certified Partner Products and from a selected few that had access to the company's "Firehose," which is the place to find a stream of millions of tweets generated by the users every second, Re/code reports.
"As Twitter has grown into a platform that delivers more than 500 million Tweets per day, Gnip has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners," Messerschmidt wrote.
Gnip, as a company, helps Twitter pack raw stream of content and resell that data to corporate clients. Twitter's rush to acquire the startup is mainly out of the fear of losing it in the hands of other tech giants, as it did with its long-term partner Topsy when Apple acquired it late last year. Twitter's newly acquired startup has ties with other social media firms including Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook, and there is no word on the future of this partnership.
Twitter has bigger plans in store with the acquisition of Gnip. "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 added.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the company's blog post.
